Wireless Headphones

This morning I visited a bunch of twenty-something kids that have developed the most amazing technology.

One of them is doing a PhD in neuroscience (or something like) that and in the course of his work noticed that here is a chemical potential difference between two side of a human head when measured at the ears.

The electrical engineer amongst them has managed to rig up a system to extract a micro-current from this chemical potential and they have developed a prototype set of wireless headphones which only consumes the power extracted from the head. That is, in principle it never needs charging!

It incorporates a specially modified and low power wireless data transmission technology which is good enough to transmit music in real time, some very low power speakers, and the energy capture and storage system. The power they have to work with is substantially below that used by current headphones and given this I was amazed at the sound quality of the prototype.

One of the very innovative inclusions is that the chemist amongst them has filled the rubber earplugs with micro-wire and this is used as a contact electrode. Just amazing.

I asked them about intellectual property and apparently one of them has a mate who knows a little about patents and they have self-filed a US patent application. I further inquired as to what they were claiming as their invention and they said the chemical potential of the human head. I noted to them that this was a dangerous strategy because one isn’t supposed to be able to get granted patents on natural features of the human body. I hope they listen to me.

It occurs to me that even if their system doesn’t work in practice that the low power consumption technologies that they are developing will allow headphones with rechargeable batteries to go around a month between recharges. Even that is something worth considering.

I can’t get too excited about this stuff. In my working life I have seen dozens of such breakthrough technologies that never got to market. The primary reason is because there is often some ‘gotcha’ in the technology that means that a critical feature can’t be released. Often the techies fall so in love with their ideas that they continue to ignore these gotcha features until they run out of money or energy, or both.

Nevertheless, I will keep an eye on these kids and see how they go.

Deep South Thinking

If you can be bothered arguing the toss over who owns the islands in the South China Sea then just build some new ones. That is what China is doing; building artificial islands in the South China Sea loaded up with ports and air bases. Very innovative, very strategic, and very blunt.

At the same time some states in the USA are passing laws that allow individuals to cite their personal religious beliefs to refuse service to a customer or resist a state non-discrimination law. This lot will end up huddled behind walls containing like-minded religious nutters with all their guns pointed outwards at the neighbouring nutters.

Eventually you’d have to think this behaviour would hit consumption of goods and services in the USA; everyone will simply refuse to serve each other. They may even start requesting that internet transactions are kosher.

My prediction; China will wake up to the fact that it will have to start consuming all of it’s own shit and turn the new islands into Club Meds.

Freedom & Empathy

Nelson Mandela said:

“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others”

Assuming that Nelson knew a thing or two about freedom, if you are in the process of casting off the chains and becoming free then you have to be very aware of the second part of this quote.

I don’t think that it’s any coincidence that most of the prophets were people that stood back and were very careful with their engagements with other people.

They were simply very aware of the impact of their own behaviour upon others and they accepted this as a responsibility, almost as a price they had paid for the enlightenment that they had achieved.

One of my learnings in life is that empathy is a two-part process; the first being aware of how another person is feeling, and the second is caring about how they feel. Without both, empathy can’t be achieved.

Oddly enough, when I put all these thoughts together I have realised that you can’t live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others if you don’t have empathy. You simply wouldn’t know enough about them, or care enough about them, in the first place.

Which is to say, you can’t be free if you don’t have empathy. But having empathy doesn’t necessarily make you free.

Tax

The financial pages are full of talk of tax reform.

This because the libs won in NSW, so many self-serving souls are saying that unpopular reform can be pushed through if the reform is well-spun to the masses.

Somewhere there is an economist that could rigorously forecast the impact of various changes to the tax system and come up with a great plan that takes into account all of the myriad of parameters.

But between that economist and any actual reform there lies the rest of us with our self interest, disinterest, mistrust, brown paper bags and cricket bats.

The whole thing seems to be an effort to soften us up for an increase in GST and more taxes on superannuation funds.

Rather than raising taxes on superannuation funds, the government would be better off if they just borrowed their money from the superannuation pool, forcibly if needs be, via bonds.

This way, because the debt is in AUDs, they could just print money to repay their debts and in the process make Australian exports more competitive and reduce the consumption of imports.

This would give them a real lever over the economy. One which they don’t have now.

What mountains?

Just about to fly back to Sydney. I checked out the pilots as I was boarding. No obvious signs of suicidal depression. Still, a little reassurance over the tannoy wouldn’t go astray.

Something like a cheerful duet of pilots cooing ‘what a great day for flying folks, we are really looking forward to not touching these controls as your autopilot looks after you and ensures your safe arrival.’

I would rather the plane was a drone not the tannoy.

Too much to ask?

Conversations that just won’t stop

An idea for Google’s gmail …

Yesterday I got an email from a distant colleague which was sent straight to trash because it was a charity-ish request for some cause that I have no interest in.

After I deleted it it kept coming back because some of the other people he had cc’ed it to just kept on replying.

Without spamming him I couldn’t get their joviality out of my inbox because of gmail’s conversation mode.

What gmail needs is a settings option that says “trash a conversation once, trash it forever”

Generally speaking there is a need for a partial spam mode where it is the subject matter that is spammed and not the sender.

Uncertainty principle

Even when they are brand new, elevators in universities all over the world seem not to work properly.

A coincidence?

Maybe it’s because they are programmed for offices and hotels which have different traffic flows.

Or that universities just cheap out and under-spec them.

Students might be practiced in the arts of abuse.

Who knows, maybe there is some darker force at work punishing us visitors silly enough to step foot onto a campus.

One thing I do know, nine times out of ten my university elevator seems to be some sort of padded cell that gives me this weird “get me out of this asylum” feeling.

Chuck Out

Twice a year we have neighbourhood chuck outs.

The streets start filling up with detritus of Chinese manufacturing at least a week before the deadline, which is tomorrow I think. There’s this fridge magnet thing I keep losing with the dates on it.

And forget about the council website; it’s useless. I just checked … Homepage > ‘living’ > ‘resources recovery and waste’ > ‘recycling and waste services’ > taken to dodgy contractor site > skip popup offer of free plastic bag > ‘collection services matters’ > ‘bulk household service’ > ‘when is my collection?’ > enter number and street name > select correct address from table with no obvious instructions to do so > and finally the dates appear!

All the stuff – it’s not that the Chinese can’t manufacture well; it’s more that they specify cheap input materials that result in the products not lasting very long.

They do this because their Western customers are cheap arses that will only buy cheap shit.

When the plastic kids’ furniture, teak chairs and BBQs get biannually hoiked, we all wander around and pick up each other’s shit.

Net, net; we are ensuring genetic diversity in the Sydney cockroach population.

There are also professional modern day tinkers that collect the good stuff, that is more than ten years old and not made in China, and flog it at auction for export as antiques to China. I know because I have a good mate with a PhD who does this for a living.

These tinkers are very important because without their efforts the system would blow up. All that incoming Chinese material would eventually cause Sydney to sink into the fracking depths if it weren’t for the tinkers and their Hiace vans.

Milk crates; they don’t get picked up. Nobody wants them. Especially the blue ones. Don’t get me started on this one, except to note that there are now more unused milk crates in Australia than there are cows.

Around a day or two after the deadline some contractor’s truck comes around and picks up the really bad shit that nobody wants.

But they won’t take chemicals, paints, building materials, unbundled green stuff, unwanted cars, dead cats, and a list of other stuff as long as your arm.

Chuck out week resembles a cultural spring. People carting their stuff out to the footpath, or wandering around the streets, scabbing, discover that there are people in the other houses on their street. This is a great opportunity for some very old-school banal conversation.

The only other time this happens is on election day. Long lines of joviality, all declaring a lack of care and interest. Lots of talking to strangers. Me wondering, where do all these people live?

Yesterday we had both an election and a chuck out on the same day. By the end of the day the introverts were totally fucked from all that small talk.

I suspect that the most affected crawled up into bed with a hot milk brandy and took their pain away by watching the libs get crowned as the least obnoxious and marginally less corrupt.

When we get fully inserted into the Matrix they would do well to institute weekly elections and chuck outs in there. A happy operative is far less likely to want to bust out of thing and pull the plug.

Sunday

Reassurance

The Online Voting Party

I vote and I’m hungry.

NSW Cents

On this state election day I was just accosted by aging agents representing the local liberal and labor candidates.

I reminded both of them that since the last election that ICAC proceedings had forced about 10 MPs or former MPs from each of the parties to resign.

After that, really, did they expect my vote?

If that wasn’t enough the local liberal candidate (and incumbent) approached me personally.

I asked him how he had represented my interests in parliament since the last election.

Clearly an odd question, but he rallied and rolled off a list of pork barrelling efforts in the local area funded by state government.

I suggested that sounded a little dodgy and noted that I wondered what he gave back in return for these local financial investments.

He was now starting to look quite nervous at talking to this idiot.

I asked what legislative bills he had introduced or promoted in parliament.

He looked very confused at this question.

He did say he had of course supported all the government’s bills.

I decided to let him get back to his main job of charming grannies.

I really think it’s time we get rid of our state parliaments.

The stakes are way too low for this to make any sense but cents.

Yeah baby

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to talk into your phone and get a blood alcohol reading. But ociffer, the thing said ‘go for it.’

2000 sunsets

Redbox

A aeroplanes’ blackbox could be more accurately described as red. No wonder they can hardly ever find the fuckers.

Value based gouging

Right this is very obscure … be warned.

If you ever get a patent you will find that your independent claims cost you more than your dependent claims.

The independent claims are broader and hence worth more in any specific patent enforcement case.

But note that it doesn’t cost the patent office any more to process the independent claims.

How is it that a government owned monopoly like the patent office can engage in such an activity as value-based pricing?

Under the ACCC rules the patent office could be argued to be abusing its monopoly position.

Nobody likes a …

They are two types of wisdom in my view.

The first that helps one understand, after the fact.

And the second, that prevents one fucking up, before the fact.

It would be a mistake to believe that doing nothing, and therefore not ever fucking up, derives from the second form of wisdom.

And it would also be a mistake to believe that successfully applying the first sort of wisdom necessarily has any impact on the frequency of future fuck ups.

Therefore and thus, my wisdom for you is that it would be a mistake to mistake any sort of wisdom for knowledge, at any time.

Exactly

When someone says ‘precisely’ you may think that they are agreeing with you whereas in fact they may be just noting that you always have the same opinion on the voiced subject.

If they agree with you they should say ‘accurately’. Oddly, no one says this.

What they do say is ‘exactly’ or ‘correct’ implying that they are the arbiter of the perceived truth, not just an observer of it.

Ingenue

It has come to my attention that in certain segments of the professional services market that ‘innovation’ is about two buzzwords back.

Since ‘innovation’ was last the consultant-lecture-torture du jour they have had ‘ingenuity’ and ‘value’.

You might think that innovation and ingenuity are the same thing but they are not.

Innovation is, say, figuring out how to improve productivity so as to get a Friday afternoon off for a drinks session down the pub.

Whereas ingenuity is figuring out how to head off to the pub and have everyone think you are somewhere on site working.

Value is a $3 schooner of New during happy hour.

Tiger mother

I just watched a young mother de-Volvo with three young kids, babies really.

She seemed blissfully unaware of her surroundings and the excessive time it was taking to get the deed done.

I suspect that if she was on a tight time budget and anxious to appear in any specific controlled manner she would go mad at her inability to achieve even a reasonable pass mark.

Lucky for her that the external environment is so safe. In times past a tiger would have had them for breakfast.

Helmet

Why for mesh?

Brake happy

I have noticed that people who feel strong entitlement in life also have a tendency to blame others when they don’t get their valued entitlements.

Unrelated, I have noticed of late more occasions of car sickness whilst tapping on this phone in a cab. It’s those bloody hopeless cabbies and their brake-happy ways, not me. Really!

Innovateur

Some people are just born naturally more innovative than the pack. They just are.

A small fraction of the genuinely innovative types get positive reinforcement around this aptitude when they are young.

An even smaller fraction of these bother to learn business, science or technology in a rigorous fashion.

Very few organizations have a place for people in this smallest of small fractions.

This is primarily because most organizations, despite what they might say to the contrary, don’t want or need innovation and can’t stand people that are unhappy unless it’s always happening (which is what an innovator is – take note, this is how to weed out the pretenders).

Rightly or wrongly, this is because the upside of executing any innovative plan is generally viewed as being outweighed by the risks.

The only time this paradigm breaks down is if the organization is under some sort of external threat, in which case they may be forced to innovate or die. Backs to the wall stuff.

This is when innovation occurs and when the most minor of minorities get to shine.

Generally though, as soon as the organization is over the hump of the threat it goes back to its staid old ways, and they execute the pesky innovators.

The only truly innovative organisations in the world are those that have the key innovator at the top, as the CEO or equivalent.

Failing this, in any organisation the innovator is either a pain in the arse or a nice mascot.

At the current moment ‘innovation’ is a business buzzword so everyone is paying lip service to it.

But its nearly done – the next buzzword is …..?

FIRB

“Earlier this month, Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey announced the first forced divestment since 2007 when he ordered the sale of a $39 million Point Piper mansion that had been illegally purchased by China’s 15th richest man.”

How about this:

1. Confiscation of the property when caught, and

2. A bounty hunter award of up to 10% for anyone helping to uncover illegal ownership, either direct or by beneficiary

That would make the foreign illegal property buyers think a little harder.

Chuck outs

Way back when I lived in a block of flats in Bondi.

One tenant was the curse of the block – parties all night, loud music and loud rooting.

It didn’t bother me too much because I was brought up in a pub.

But it did bother my neighbours, greatly.

Months of assiduous complaining to the body corporate by the accursed brought only temporary relief.

The antagonist truly thought that each complaint was ephemeral; specific to the incident at hand.

He had not the capacity to extrapolate to the root cause, namely a general dislike of not being able to sleep.

I think this was because he slept during the day and couldn’t see why they wouldn’t as well.

One day, over a beer and a smoke on the back verandah I tried to explain this to him.

I like to think that it was I who precipitated his next action; he made a formal written complaint to the council about his own noisy emissions.

You couldn’t argue that he didn’t have a sense of humour.

But I was the only other person in the block that was laughing.

Wise guy

Ever met a Sagess? I have.

Still life with chips

Random scooter invention

Last week I designed a new scooter and I have no idea why.

The basic idea is to have two half size (350mm/14 inch diameter) front wheels (half the size of racing bike wheels), with a scooter platform and a small rear wheel as per the picture below.

The whole thing would fold-up (for the scooter platform and rear wheel) and drop down (for the handlebars) such that the whole mechanism can be contained between the two wheels except for the protruding handlebars, which would be used to carry the thing when not in use.

The standing platform could include a battery which could drive an electric motor in either the front or back wheels.

Is there any benefit over existing designs?

Well, the big front wheels help stability and smoothness on rough surfaces, and the double front wheels offers a nice fold-up capability not possible for large single front wheeled scooters.

Dog bite

The mind of a Gen Y goldfish has been trained not to notice much.

By way of example, the young French girl in the local cafe.

After she makes a coffee she had no idea who ordered it even though she took the order.

She will happily get distracted with some non-time critical activity even though there are customers waiting.

When prompted to serve an exasperated customer she shows no remorse or recognition of the customer’s feelings.

The idea of letting this customer know how long my slice of quiche may take to get packaged is well beyond her.

I believe this lack of awareness results from being brought up in a totally safe environment.

We of other generations were brought up with more anxiety.

We needed to watch and observe our environments in order to predict when issues were coming up.

It might have been the bad mood of a mother or a potential bite from a neighborhood dog.

Danger was lurking everywhere and we watched and simulated scenarios without realizing what we were doing.

Until this process became second nature.

So you see, it’s not just the overuse of antibiotics that has compromised a good slab of a whole generation.

Pole dancing

If the premier of NSW loses the upcoming election it will be because of two reasons.

One, Tony Abbott, which we can’t really blame Baird for. Although he seems a lot closer to the onion eater than is explicable by any measure of intelligence.

And two, because he wants to sell our electricity poles (aka telegraph poles) to a private monopoly (that will subsequently rape us for their use) and then recycle the sale proceeds into transport (roads and trains) and probably a little debt repayment.

You have to wonder why our politicians feel the need to do anything? As soon as they do they become a target for the opposition and the press.

If I was in government I would be selling long term leases to government monopolies rather than ‘selling’ them. Same thing really but much better politics.

For example, they could sell a 20, 30 or even a 99 year lease on the poles with options for renewal. The value of such a lease wouldn’t be much different from the sale of the whole shebang – the value of the business would be based on the discounted cash flow of the operating profits, and the underlying assets would be a cost neutral and deteriorating asset that needs a pesky and constant injection of capital by the lessee.

Hang on, this is what they are doing. You wouldn’t know it from the public discourse. All they need to do is put in penalty clauses on price gouging and it would be fine. This is just a matter of communications.

Just as aside we might be better off flogging the poles before everyone goes off grid. As power storage becomes more cost effective, the move to ever-cheapening solar energy will accelerate. The residual grid connected customers will then pay more for the privilege, hence creating even further incentives to go off grid. No amount of government intervention can permanently get in the way of such an appealing option.

InnovationXchange

On the just announced InnovationXchange.

A new foreign Aid initiative by Australia and the Bloomberg’s founder – a $35m per annum center in Canberra (of all places) that will focus on assessing why decades of foreign aid, like Australia’s supposed $5b per annum effort, hasn’t sorted out any of the world’s problems

“The former New York mayor’s Bloomberg Philanthropies will contribute $US85m (cash or in-kind I wonder?) towards the cost of the Data for Health project. The Australian government will contribute $20m, of which $15m will come from the new innov­ationXchange budget and $5m from the health segment of the remaind­er of the aid budget. The (residual $15m of the) $140m outlay over four years for the innovationXchange centre will come from the overall aid budget”.

This is brilliant. Foreign aid expenditure that is spent in Australia. A building in Canberra for people to visit. Data for Bloombergs to capture and re-sell. An opportunity to abduct all the metadata in the pacific just for the hell of it. And at virtually no incremental cost to the government. It’s what you would call a no-brainer.

The foreign minister Ms Bishop “hopes innovation­Xchange will develop a hi-tech start-up mentality”. In Canberra? And just to double down on this one – “It will be headed by a senior Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade bureaucrat”.

Crisis Hollywood

I wonder if anyone has ever made a movie without some sort of crisis in it?

This after watching Paddington Bear where they managed to include both a chase and a villain (a very unbelievable Nicole Kidman) into a story extracted from a book of short stories that had neither.

Nexus 6 screenshot is rubbish

Taking a screenshot on the Nexus 6 involves depressing the two external buttons simultaneously. It’s hard because they are on the same side of the phone. Even if you get the timing just right, and you have to or else it ignores you, it doesn’t work half the time. It needs a rethink and an update.

Spreadsheet addition

One other thing that I am very proud of is that, despite arriving in this world with congenital melancholia, I have through sheer willpower and application mostly attenuated this tendency.

It’s not all bad, melancholia. Think of it as time enough to think and feel. It’s the low level chronic blues that comes with it that is worth avoiding.

Passata

All over the western world governments are starting to introduce food safety bills.

One aspect of these bills is the control of seed stock and the mandatory use of purchased seeds as opposed to seeds from heirloom seed banks or self generated seeds.

I am guessing that the arguments for this would be for safety (seeds engineered to resist the latest upcoming catastrophe), agricultural productivity (seeds engineered to produce enough food to keep us all alive), terrorism (to prevent terrorists introducing food borne terror), and the enablement of sufficient agribusiness profitability allowing investment into R&D to ensure all these benefits are maintained.

Two predictions; we will be buying heirloom tomatoes on the black market and Italy will leave the EU.

Pockets

Paddington Bear thought that pockets were great sandwich compartments.

Segue alert; sandwiches to smartphones. Same format, different material science.

If these smartphones get any bigger men’s clothes are going to have to designed around them.

Lacking handbags, what we need is front facing pockets that are easily accessible and protects the phone from being sat on in a back pocket, big enough for the phone, not too low on the legs so the headphones reach the ears, and not too wide so the phone doesn’t annoyingly fall sidewise in the pocket.

My current shorts have exactly such pockets that are perfect for this Nexus 6, which is no sylph I can tell you.

Imagine every pair of shorts and jeans and trousers having such pockets? Fashionistas are going to suffer.

The alternative is a slap-on pocket you can transfer to everything you wear, except budgie smugglers. I will leave the attachment and detachment mechanism to the prodigally excitable tech heads.

Shady

Yesterday I had a discussion with one of my sales guy in china over under-the-table payments.

This is where the customer pays a supplier $500k for a tool but where the supplier also give $100k to the manager at the customer who makes the decision, usually in a brown paper bag.

In total the supplier nets $400k.

Since this is illegal for an Australian company anyone so inclined would usually need an intermediary agent that would makes the actual sale and do all the shady shit. Even so, I don’t like the sound of it all.

I said how about we just sell the tool to them for $400k and the company can give the manager a $100k bonus for selecting such a good tool.

Let’s call this an over-the-table deal.

The customer’s benefit is that for the same gross price they actually get the best tool, not the one with the biggest under-the-table payment.

I was told that this suggestion was “illogical and illegal”.

Go figure.­­­

Truth is, these under-the-table payments are shared with superiors and underlings. It’s a whole Amway-ish pyramid of side payments that stretches all way to the top. Let’s hope they never fix it; god help us if the Chinese ever root out this cause of their institutionalized mediocrity.

Airco

There are people so toxic that an act of kindness in their direction is effectively self harm.

Circularity of teeth

I used to think that it didn’t matter so much what you thought or felt, but that your actions were what counted most.

I rationalised that all actions can be broken down into units that are binary choices – you either do something or you do not.

This was a sort of restatement of ‘it’s what you do that counts’.

I have come to realise that this life-view supposes that the physical world between me and other people is the ‘real’ world.

However, if I am honest, the inside of my head and body feels just as real. And maybe, by extension, it is so for others.

And in this case everyone’s feelings and thoughts may be just as important as their actions.

Feelings and thoughts aren’t as visible to other people as your actions.

They can be disguised and hidden on purpose.

And in this we can cause ourselves much pain and also much pleasure.

Logically, based on these thoughts, I should now draw a conclusion and suggest an action, but I don’t feel like it.

Six pack (content warning)

God is all of us.

A priest must wear a mask of convenience.

A warrior and a king must be reluctant.

A lover must forgive all.

And the sage knows all of this.

Random thoughts

Twice in the past two weeks I have listened to very nice people explain to me how a perpetual motion machine might work.

One was variably a yacht or a plane, where a surface coating not only reduced frictional drag but also magically provided thrust.

The other was a drone that captured the energy of rotation by adding alternators to the drive-shafts, hence generating the energy to motivate the thing.

Now I don’t see it as my job to explain the first and second beliefs of thermodynamics to every lay person with a dream.

I mean, I would if they actually started building one. But if it’s just beer talk, what’s the harm?

Coincidentally a nice young ‘inventor’ contacted me yesterday and he wants my help to commercialise his invention.

He has developed an algorithm, he says, that sees order in what has always been considered by everyone else to be random.

He is claiming to be able to use this to make predictions. I have offered to him the Forex market as a test bed, although knowing that this isn’t entirely random. But hey.

It got me wondering, what law of maths or physics states that there is no way to make predictions from studying randomness?

Nuh, it’s just a definition. If we can’t find anyway to make prediction from studying numbers then they must be random, for now.

Rather usefully, mathematical theory restates it thus; randomness implies that there must be an infinite expansion of information for randomness to exist.

You see, there are no fundamental laws of mathematics, just a bunch of circular collective beliefs. It’s no way to spend your life me thinks.

Truth and lies

Truths and lies, these are antonyms are they not? Not according to the dictionaries.

Truth is the antonym of lie, but lie is not the antonym of truth.

Whence cometh this unexpected asymmetry?

A perusal of Wikipedia reveals that this cesspit of crowdsourced information reveals no truths but it does weed out lies.

That is, it is an encyclopedia of widely shared beliefs, as opposed to individual beliefs.

Individual beliefs are not necessarily lies but they have a higher chance of being so than collective beliefs, by the very definition indeed.

The only real truth out there is that sometimes people tell absolute lies that they don’t believe in at all.

Now Google

I am waiting for Google Now to twig that I cycle to and from work.

Note to self

It’s what you find compelling that is the real tell-tale.

Your interest in your own scenarios should be calibrated ex post facto.

And then you need to take a good long honest look at yourself and recognise your self-delusions.

Time and time again, until it is not needed.

Fairness & Freedom

There is a new app out called ‘Gender Avenger Tally app’.

It lets users create gender-focused pie charts (on anything) that they can share on Twitter and Facebook.

Like how many women are in federal parliament, or how many female toilets are in the pub, or how many of the wombats at the zoo are girls (my daughter once asked me this), etc.

The point of the app is to share the outrage at the unfairness of gender imbalances in order to drive the movements for changes that address these unfairnesses.

What we also need is an accompanying app that creates pie charts that highlight the prevalence of proposed legislative solutions to issues labelled as unfair, whether these are gender-based, racially-based or otherwise.

It is possible that the price of fairness will be our freedom. It could be a case of ‘careful what you wish for’ or more succinctly, ‘be careful how you try to fix those issues that outrage you so much’.

Which green?

Opposition to the Baird government’s electricity privatisation plans has galvanised a preference deal between Labor and the Greens in the lead-up to the NSW state election.

“The Greens have taken the same view as Labor that privatising the electricity network is a bad deal for NSW, so we’re happy to enter into a preference agreement with them.”

You would think that privatising the electricity network would naturally lead to higher electricity prices which would then act to reduce electricity consumption and thus reduce green house gas emissions, all of which looks pretty green to me.

Or is that an entirely different shade of green do you think?

Patent Options

Options are derivative contracts that give the holder the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell the underlying instrument at a specified price on or before a specified future date.

A patent is a contract that gives the holder the right, but not the obligation, to sue a competitor for patent infringement for implied or real financial gain. However, in a subsequent court case the patent rights may be re-examined and the holder of the patent has no guarantee that their patent rights will be upheld.

In essence a patent is a ‘naked’ option that allows a party to enforce a specifically-defined state-granted monopoly. There is no offsetting position in an underlying security and there is no protection against unfavourable court proceedings; just the option.

The cost (premium) of acquiring a patent right can be accurately calculated and depends on many choices made by the applicant.

The implied or real financial gain from patent enforcement (which itself can be actual or virtual, simply due to the existence of the patent) depends on many factors such as jurisdiction, legal budget, the scope of product revenues, willingness of the parties to settle, and many other factors.

The likelihood that a patent right will be upheld in a court proceeding is also dependent on many factors such as the jurisdiction, type of invention, the prior art, the quality of the original patent office examination, the determination of the opponent, and many other factors.

These are just notes to self … I am working on a patent pricing model.

Note to Lola

It’s what other people find compelling that is the real tell-tale.

Their interest in you should be calibrated thus.

And then you need to take a good long honest look at yourself and recognise your self-delusions.

Time and time again, until it is not needed.

Donkey above the line

On my cycle to work, and ahead of an upcoming state election, there are billboards plastered everywhere for the Australia Cyclist Party.

Tempting as it is to ‘Vote 1’ above the line for this mob so that we, the down trodden warriors of the asphalt have a democratic voice, I suspect some due diligence is required.

Many of the single purpose ‘protest’ parties seem to be fronts with the express purpose of funnelling preferences along to some shady candidate that does get voted into the dregs of the cross benches of the senate (or legislative council in the confusing case of the NSW state parliament).

Whereas the original protest party candidates are usually young and enthusiastic, the character that gets the seat is usually an old bloke in a bad suit with a square head and a countenance more suited to being chair of the local rotary club or a standards body, a COMET advisor, or a local councillor. You know the type.

And why would the old bloke do this? Money is the main reason. A seat in the parliament, especially one with a senate in the balance opens up all sorts of financial opportunities.

I read somewhere about this bloke who organises all this. He sets up all the protest parties, arranges their preference flows, and then must take a cut in the profits with the old bloke. Sounds like corruption right? Not if it’s within the law.

As I say to my Chinese customers, the only difference between corruption in Australia and China is that here in Australia we have figured out how to be corrupt within the law. They could learn a lot from us, the Chinese. I am sure they will – they are quick students of self interest, that is for sure.

You would think that the major parties would gang up and fix the protest party preference flow issue by getting rid of ‘above the line’ voting, where the recipient of the vote – the protest party – gets to decide where the voting preferences flow. But the major parties are the ones that introduced the ‘above the line’ voting in the first place. It’s also in their interests.

Sometimes I wonder if our duopolistic power-mad leaders even want control of the senate. Maybe they are happy to have a good reason to do fuck-all since this then allows them to focus on the main game of pork barrelling and reliving their uni review wars. Pork barrelling becomes much easier when there is some dickhead protest senator to blame for it.

When it comes to electoral reform I am not asking for the removal of preferential voting or the abandonment of compulsory voting; that would be too much.

All I ask is that they put in a formal donkey vote box on the voting form so that my genuine protest vote is counted and reported. There is absolutely nothing informal about my voting intentions.

Patently Derivative

A patent is a contract between a party and the government.

The primary purpose of the contract is for the government to grant to the other party an option to prosecute a third party for infringement of a claimed crown or state monopoly as defined in the contract.

In other words, our governments are selling derivatives on crown or state monopolies.

And in my opinion the cost of acquisition of these derivatives is generally well overpriced given the uncertainties around the scope and legitimacy of the implied crown or state monopolies within these option contracts.

If I get a chance I might apply a bit of formal derivative pricing to the subject.

TBD for world champions

Beer run

Isn’t the Australian suburban landscape just so awe inspiring?

A2

I was being pressured to buy A2 milk. WTF? A little research later I find that…

There’s at least two types of beta casein in milk, the result of a genetic mutation about 10,000 years ago. Western herds are predominately the A1 type.

Our enzymes that chomp the beta casein produce different chemical products in our guts for the A1 and A2 varieties. Some companies have been promoting their A2 milk based on the negative health risks of A1 milk.

Responding to public interest in the marketing of A2 milk the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) reviewed the scientific literature and published a review on the subject in 2009.

The EFSA found no relationship between chronic diseases and drinking milk with the A1 protein.

The EFSA study emphasized the dangers of drawing conclusions from correlations identified in epidemiological studies (i.e. correlations versus causations) and the dangers of not reviewing all the evidence at hand (i.e ‘cherry picking data’).

None of this stops the Australian a2 milk company claiming or implying all sorts of health benefits over A1 milk. Although they are smart enough to add this disclaimer:

“The a2 Milk Company™ has made reasonable efforts to ensure that the content and the representation of the scientific literature in the Health Professionals’ pages are accurate and not misleading. By presenting the scientific literature as reviews and/or as hyperlinks to scientific publications, The a2 Milk Company™ does NOT make any representation as to the health benefits of A2 dairy foods compared with non-A2 dairy foods. The website is provided ’on face value’ and The a2 Milk Company™ disclaims any and all liability for any third party’s personal interpretation of the scientific information and hyperlinks to any scientific publications in the Health Professionals’ pages. Material in this website should NOT be construed as endorsing any health claim for A2 dairy products…”

I might stick to Pauls.

Dogs v Eels

Because it was old Fred’s 94th birthday I watched a game of rugby league with him. His idea.

I haven’t watched a regular season game for quite some time. Hasn’t the game changed?

With the ten meter rule and ultra quick play the ball, it felt like a violent game of touch.

Invariably the first three tackles were dummy half runs. 30 meters gained.

Each tackle had about 4 defenders involved. 400kg on 100kg; they are just asking to rack up injuries. Of which there were many.

The fourth and fifth tackles usually involved the attacking team unleashing a set move involving passing behind decoy shepherd runners. These moves had nothing to do with what the defense were doing at the time.

The forwards, when taking the ball up on the fourth and fifth tackles, looked they were auditioning for the lead role in the upcoming movie on the life of Artie Beetson. Every time, they attempted the off-load. And about half the time they lost the ball. It would be even more often if defenders weren’t so heavily penalised for stripping the pill. But really, the way these guys hold the ball so loosely in tackles, they deserve to be stripped.

They seem to have stopped bombing the ball on the sixth; they kick for the line, presumably because they enjoy a scrum so much.

The aerial drone shot of the scrum was beyond laughable.They were hardly touching each other; it was like a bunch of blokes standing uncomfortably close to each other while the half back tossed the ball to his backs.

Most of the tries were the result of the outside defending backs getting out of defensive position and then being confused as to who they should tackle. That much hasn’t changed in the game since I was a kid.

And the art of converting a try seemed to have been lost on this particular night.

Every single try went to the video ref to check for off-the-ball infringements because of all those shepherd decoy runs. Another few minutes wasted. If these passes behind decoy runners need slow motion video examination for legitimacy after every try then surely they need to be banned from general play?

As a spectacle this game between Canterbury-Bankstown and Parramatta had the appeal of watching a dog and an eel flap around in the shallows of a lake trying to figure out how to fight each other.

HP

My parent’s new $33 inkjet printer just randomly extruded this set of lazy calibration instructions. Seriously HP, you can’t just do this to old folk. I get the call every time.

Clock spring

I really wish those fuckers down there at IKEA would get their part quantities right.

There’s nothing worse than finishing a three hour job only to find one part left over.

After another ten minutes of frantic checking; yes, they gave me one extra.

It sort of reminds me of the time, as a kid, when I surreptitiously pulled the family clock apart.

After I put it back together there was one spring left over.

The clock still seemed to work so I stashed the spring and said nothing.

Greeky

When I was young a spent a little time working in Crete and also traveling around Greece.

The legacy is an enduring love of feta cheese, Greek yoghurt, baklava made with Cretan honey, and Greek salads with watercress.

Confucius on the Internet

Memo to the Chinese politburo on the subject of the Internet.

As a weapon of control, disinformation is a far more powerful than censorship.

That is, it’s better to hide a body in a cemetery than attempt to burn it with a match.

Sounds sufficiently Confuciusian, no?

IKEA again

I can’t choose which better foreshadows an eternal hell, Peter’s of Kensington or IKEA of Ρόδος.

Upon further reflection, IKEA wins since Peter’s is usually followed by a piss up (otherwise known as a wedding) whereas a trip to IKEA results in the maddening assembly of some complex collection of chipboard atrocities.

House your enemy

In Australia we have incredible wealth.

Decades of improving productivity combined with a continent’s worth of resources has meant that wealth as measured by assets per person has just continued to increase.

A large fraction of that wealth has been sunk into real estate.

Quite bizarrely we have mostly chosen to live in a handful of cities, and this has led to incredibly high real estate costs driven by a permanent under-supply of housing.

That money that is sunk into real estate, where does it go?

There are buyers and sellers and then there are also service providers such as real estate agents and builders.

The latter group get to make their own contribution to the market by sinking their own wealth back into real estate; they know no better.

In the main there is very little free cash flow coming out of the real estate market.

Sometimes someone might cash out and spend that cash on lifestyle choices or business, but this is rare. Generally reinvestment into the same market is the norm.

So the winners are the financiers, the banks, that borrow cheaply overseas and lend that to us for real estate purchases at nice margins.

The local beneficiaries of their success are their employees and shareholders who, guess what, invest much of their wealth into the same real estate market.

If the country had a balance sheet there would be this real estate line item just sucking up all the cash flow and continuing to appreciate as an asset. Zeros building up in holding accounts – that’s all we get for our efforts.

One of the issues is that the supply-limited real estate market is there on ‘purpose’; it is good for the banks, builders and agents – an unholy interest group that can influence local and state governments to maintain the supply side issues in order to maximise their profits and minimise their efforts.

We would need city-wide governments, free of state governments, to fix this supply side issue in our existing cities.

Even if we had city-governments the problem would continue to exist; the population pressures we are going to face in the future would out-race even the best planning within these cities.

What we really need is new cities. We need to take cities such as Newcastle, Coffs Harbour and even Nowra and actively turn them into business centers with populations of more than 1 million people.

The more free cash in an economy, not tied up in real estate, the likelier it is that there will be risk capital available for investment into the development of new export industries.

And superannuation is not really free cash – because of certain tax benefits it naturally avoids certain higher risk activities.

But, in any case, the idea that we let people take super out early and invest in real estate, as Joe Hockey proposed this week, is simply retarded. It would make things just that much worse than they already are.

If real estate prices ever drop across the board we are going to have a real issue of our own making. But it’s probably the correction we need to have.

Balmoral lifestyles

And there I was, sipping a beer with Larry at the Bathers Pavilion, contemplating the murmur emanating from the surrounding mass of segregated white-bread politeness.

I thought to myself “what we can’t do is endlessly subsidize lifestyle choices if those lifestyle choices are not conducive to the kind of full participation in Australian society that everyone should have.”

Megamouth shark washes up in Philippines and is only the 60th we’ve ever seen.

Damn interesting stuff

Shark Devocean

On the morning of the 28th of January in Barangay Marigondon, Philippines, local residents discovered a mysterious shark washed up on their coastline caught in fishing nets. After contacting local authorities, it was confirmed to be the ever elusive megamouth shark, Megachasma pelagios. This is, by my records, only the 60th confirmed documentation of this enigmatic shark. Whilst detailed information on this species is still lacking, some biological information is known about this shark:  check out my 12 brain fondling facts here. 

But what have we learnt about this shark since its last sighting back in July of 2014.

[EDIT]: The original upload of the photo was by Rosalina Sariola of Marine Wildlife Watch of the Philippines (as credited under the photo and hyperlinked). Please see their Facebook page for more videos and photos of the event. All other pictures used are credited to the photographer and also hyperlinked to…

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AGL

It’s odd isn’t it that our utility service providers don’t understand that we don’t pay bills on time because we simply can’t be arsed.

Their current payment systems are weird. Check out that reference number below! There’s enough digits in there to label every atom on the planet.

What we need is a ‘utilities app’ where you can add all your utility services, get bill payment notifications, check account details make payments, get invoices and the like, and do it all on your phone.

Most Livable My Arse

Listening to the radio yesterday I finally got an answer to the puzzle of why Sydney and Melbourne rank so highly on those ‘most livable city’ lists.

These lists are actually compiled by international HR firms and relate to the costs of relocating corporate expats to different countries.

The list of most livable cities is inversely proportional to the cost of enticing corporate types to a city. The easier it is to entice an expat to a city, the lower the cost of doing so, and hence the ‘more livable’ tag.

Given the salaries and packages that expats receive these lists should not be construed to infer any general sense of ‘livability’ of a city.

Services

What we need for jobs in the service sector is a index from -1 and 1 for wealth generation.

A rating of zero would mean that the job has no wealth generation function.

A rating of minus one would indicate that the job actually is some wealth-destroying government mandated cost to business.

A rating of one would mean the service sector job has a direct and measurable export wealth generating function.

And of course there would be a broad distribution of all the jobs in the Australian services sector between -1 and 1.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see that distribution?

Jealousy – a reader’s digest

Janet Hardy wrote a very interesting chapter on jealousy in one of her books (that was just yesterday brought to my attention).

Here is a quick summary of the whole chapter in words and a picture.

The ‘best’ way to do deal with the natural emotion of jealousy is to practice detachment (from the fear of loss), dialogue (over arguing), and to practice the practice of dealing with jealousy in this way (over not practicing).

Like anything other human skill there are means and ways to achieve anything, but these take practice.

By ‘best’ the author implied that the ability to not control a loved one through jealous behaviour gives better outcomes for everyone involved. With the usual unfortunate statistical outliers and all that.

In a relationship, the alternative is to practice ‘fortified monogamy’ (my term). Janet thinks this is just too hard to sustain and not that good for the development of a soul. And not very interesting either, she reckons.

Optical focus

A measurement of the optical focus of eyeballs on pixels; that’s what we need from a display technology. There’s no other foolproof way to measure the actual consumption of content.

Kauffman

The Kauffman Foundation has published a fantastic report on US Venture Capital – see http://bit.ly/18yQrA5

Over a 20 year period, starting in the early 90’s, only four of thirty venture capital funds with committed capital of more than $400 million delivered returns better than those available from a publicly traded small cap common stock index.

The irony is of course that without the value-destroying venture capital sector the returns available in the traded small cap would be much lower because there would be far fewer companies in this sector, and much less development capital.

The LPs losses are the the US economy’s gain. If I were them I would be looking for some serious tax breaks for this collective act of economic charity.

Concentrated madness

Two miners, four banks and one Telco collectively account for 40% of the value of the ASX 200.

What’s the point? Isn’t it about time exchanges were denationalized?

Byron at midnight

Probiotic nuts

New product idea no. 3632.

Recently some academics have shown that 80% of kids with nut allergies could be cured of their affliction by a month of feeding them a bucket load of probiotics and traces of nuts.

This works because the gut is the engine room of immunity and this has been comprised of late by excessive use of antibiotics, over cleanliness, excessive numbers of caesarian births, and in some cases also extended periods of breast feeding.

The probiotics address the bug imbalances and the trace amounts of nuts is presumably required to ensure the bugs learn to deal with the allergens therein.

My thinking is that if a kid has allergies then rather than trying to figure out what the allergy is (which never seems to work anyway) we should put on them on a month-long probiotic diet and feed then traces of all the usual allergens.

Who cares which one it was after the fact?

The nips are getting bigger

Most of the productivity gains in the last 200 years have been driven by technologies that have made products and services, delivered to people, just that much cheaper (in real terms) per unit.

Much of the technology in question has also enabled the introduction of entirely new products and services.

In terms that economists use, such as forecasting long term economic growth of Australia, a key input is future gains in productivity. What they actually use as a prediction of gains in productivity for the next 40 years is the mean % number for the last 40 years. Which means that they have no idea.

What they really want to forecast is the gains in wealth per person, which is correlated to how little of our time is required to survive (say, to earn food and pay for a roof over our heads) and how much we can afford to consume in the fraction of non-sleeping time not required for survival.

As an aside, clearly the big opportunity for the productivity freaks is to develop means to consume while we are asleep. Automated consumption. If a trees falls in the forest and no one sees it, did it happen?

My concern is that the economists are not seeing the bigger picture. In light of global warming and diminishing resources we have to figure how to consume less by becoming more virtual in our consumption, i.e. we have to enter into the Matrix.

What a paradox. Productivity may continue to improve but consumption may start to decline forever. There goes the fundamentals of our current global economies and god help us.

Due to increasing concentration of the capital for investment into technologies, much of the new emerging technologies that will drive increases in productivity will be owned by fewer and fewer groups of people. Most of them will not be in Australia and it is likely that the introduction of these technologies will not enrich many Australians.

Already we are stretching the rubber band of wealth distribution in Australia – 68% of GDP is in the services sector. Much of that is government mandated and actually works against the productivity of our tiny export sectors in resources and agriculture by adding costs that are not seen by foreign competition in these sectors.

I predict that Australia will have a wealth distribution inflection point where the wealth from our genuine wealth generating sectors will get trapped either within a small group of Australians or exported to the overseas owners of the high productivity technologies.

The wealth distributed to and circulated within the services sector will come under increasing pressure and unemployment in this sector will spiral out of control.

Compounding this problem will be the aging population that are not willing or not able to participate in the wealth generating sectors, so, if forced to work, will put even more pressure on the over-subscribed services sector.

The only responsible action from our government will be serious increases of taxes on our resources sector. Such action has just been dumped but it will be back on the table. This will only work if foreign resources, not encumbered with such taxes, don’t out-compete our exports in the global markets.

Even if this eventuates it means that government will become even more central to our lives.

I think it’s about time we invest seriously in developing a technology sector before it’s too late. Otherwise it’s not going to be pretty.

The only other solution would be to put up the walls around Club Oz and go all Amish.

Every word has a meaning

Earwax

“Earwax, also known by the medical term cerumen, is a yellowish waxy substance secreted in the ear canal of humans and other mammals. It protects the skin of the human ear canal, assists in cleaning and lubrication, and also provides some protection from bacteria, fungi, insects and water.”

Who said evolution always find the best solution? If it does, for mine, this is evidence that we are but a failed experiment.

Digital SLRs

You have to feel for the vendors of digital cameras.

The smartphone industry has gouged their market and they are living in a shrinking market; the very worst place to be in the corporate world.

They might counter that the premium DSLR end can’t be touched because of the need for proper optics that just can’t fit into the smartphone format.

This may be true but I wouldn’t underestimate the R&D dollars being invested into smartphone sensor technology and processing software in attempts to ameliorate these issues.

In any case, a shrinking market often requires a re-think of the business model.

No one wants to be the last seller of buggy whips do they?

Today their primary business model for the vendors of DSLRs is capital equipment sales, the cameras themselves.

Then there is all this other income from accessories which they share with any number of third party companies.

They don’t own their channels – they use any number of parallel distribution channels and they can’t control the message that their end customers receive.

My suggestion to them of an alternative business model is this:

1. Sell a camera body with basic specs at cost, or even give it away

2. But sign people up to a web-based subscription service that is required to use the camera. Recurring revenue is the key.

3. Offer proprietary software upgrades and aggressively block third party accessories through patents and registered design features.

4. Include a web based ‘iTunes’ style environment for purchasing of all sorts of things such as accessories, upgrades, apps, extra features. Allow third parties to use this platform but only after being vetted and then also with a significant clipping of the ticket.

5. Offer hardware upgrades through the store – they could even make all the hardware components replaceable within the body so that users could slowly upgrade the camera with better sensors, more memory and the like.

6. Through the web subscription service offer and control third party services such as printing, photo sharing, competitions, curated photo sites, etc – all of these exist already, but the idea would be to force them into a iTunes like model where quality in controlled and revenue is licensed.

In fact, if I was to advise Nikon and Canon, I would say to them team up to do this and freeze everyone else out into the cold.

Game over.

Occupational Power Structures & Sexual Harassment

On the subject of sexual harassment and abuse I was asked to clarify when is verbal harassment just verbal. I am not sure it’s the right question; let me explain.

This is a quote from the SHM today on the subject of Sydney surgeons and their private school ways:

“..surgeons routinely told her she was a “dumb bitch”, and that women were “f—ing useless” and men should be hired instead…On one occasion, a consultant surgeon told her to “get some knee pads and learn to suck c–k”, which was laughed off by colleagues who were present…She said that a senior colleague inappropriately touched her on several occasions and that she was ostracised after she rebuked him.”

(odd that in the 21st century that the herald can’t print ‘fucking’ and ‘cock’, don’t you think? Part of the problem maybe?)

Reading between the lines, the blokes in these type of professions can get away with this behaviour (for now) because they control the actual power structure within these professions, which are self-contained pyramids controlled by old blokes with bad attitudes. Many of the well-paid trades, medicine and law come to mind, have such self-governing structures – partnerships, societies and regulatory bodies – that bequeath status and position.

The key indicator is how many real decisions get made on the golf course or at the club.

This is very different to the corporate world where actual performance eventually catches up with even the most well-connected misogynistic areshole. And also where corporate embarrassment through the wrong sort of publicity can hurt sales, especially in the B2C corporations. It’s not perfect, and certainly not as good in the B2B world, but its getting better all the time, with feedback loops to root out issues.

Fundamentally, the corporate senior mangers are more focused on their greed than preserving some old world structure. It’s one unexpected upside of excessive senior management remuneration in the corporate world.

The solution we currently have for sexual harassment within the opaque pyramid professions is a complaint structure that backfires on the victim, whether that harassment is verbal or physical.

In fact, if it is just verbal then the complaint is seen as trivial and caused by the victim’s lack of tolerance or humor.

But then the attacks may ramp up slowly and the victim becomes the proverbial frog in boiling water, slowly being tested for tolerance without complaint.

So in many ways these verbal attacks are just as dangerous as physical attacks, simply because they can foreshadow them.

In other cases the attacks remain verbal. Their function is to keep the women down at the bottom of the opaque pyramid otherwise the fear is that too many will get to the top and they will change the pyramid structure. They only want one or two well-behaved women, who have passed the ‘test’, at the top-end of pyramid – they need these for appearance’s sake.

And ‘change’ is what these bastards fear most. You can tell this by the type of professions they go into; where there is little change, where you can learn everything, where there is no unexpected risks, and where you can be safe that you will retire with money in your bank account so long as you played the game as it should be.

The best solution to solving sexual harassment in these old-school professions is to bust open their power structures. Destroy their partnerships, societies and self-managed regulatory authorities. Expose them to extreme organisational change.

My root cause analysis says ‘occupational power structures’. Destroy these and we may be a long way towards solving the problem of sexual harassment in these professions.

Clarity

New product idea no. 3521

Battery powered transition sunglasses linked to your smartphone with low power Bluetooth such that they automatically go clear when you glance at your phone when you are out in the bright sunlight.

Old Man Surgeon

A female vascular surgeon in Sydney made the mistake of saying that sexism is so rife among surgeons in Australia that young women in the field should probably just accept unwanted sexual advances because coming forward could ruin their careers.

By ‘accepting’ unwanted sexual advances she meant; sucking it up, not complaining to some authority, and probably telling the bloke to get stuffed, with some cutting humour.

This practical advice has outraged the politically correct types, especially those that earn a living off campaigning for ‘equal rights’. I can feel their pain. Actually ‘equal rights’ is a misnomer – what they are campaigning for is legal intervention into every goddamned corner of our lives just to ensure there is not one whit of unfairness left.

For some women, early in their careers, they have not the emotional armour to survive such sexual advances. For them the path of complaint and official processes makes sense. Often though, if they knew what this entails they wouldn’t enter into the process. But it does have a side benefit of toughening them up, eventually.

On the other hand, the surgeon’s advice is meant for those who just want to get on with their careers and who have no desire to becomes martyrs to a cause. These are the women that are born with the emotional armour required to deflect sexual advancement from old blokes.

Neither party in this dispute is right or wrong; it’s horses for courses. It’s just a shame that neither party can accept this. The campaigners against unfairness are most to blame. They are the victims in this story; they have little humour, little emotional armour, and as a result they generally wish to force their position down everyone’s throats whether we want it or not.

More the shame that the missing person in this missive, the old bloke surgeon, is so emotionally undeveloped as a human being that he feels the need to energize his sense of self worth by exercising power in sexual advances, careless and uncaring of the impact upon another soul. A life wasted right there, old man surgeon.

End Note; if the unwanted sexual harassment tips over into the physical then the old bloke needs to be outed. It’s a different situation entirely to sexual advances of the verbal category, and this needs to be made clear in any debate on the subject.

Jealousy and Envy

Jealousy and envy are sisters. One relates to the potential loss of things you are attached to, and the other relates to a desire for things that someone else has.

Robert Heinlein rather unkindly said that “A competent and self confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.”

That sentence rings truer when ‘jealousy’ is replaced with ‘envy’.

I can imagine a person who is well adjusted, fearing the loss of a dearly loved partner, experiencing jealousy as a natural human emotion.

The symptoms of neurotic insecurity are related to how one reacts to the emotion of jealousy. Does it control you, or do you control it? Do you own it, or blame someone else?

I don’t believe in not having emotions. If Robert was right, the only way to be free of neurotic insecurities would be to be attached to nothing except yourself. The trailer park solution.

And just for the record, one of the clearest symptoms of neurotic insecurities is someone who purposefully, whether consciously or otherwise, works to make someone else envious or jealous.

Neurotic insecurities are like a disease that can only be lived with if the pain is transferred to others. And this is only possible if the other person is also neurotically insecure.

In order to address these issues, envy is the easier to target first. Self confidence earned through achievement and understanding can help attenuate all feelings related to envy.

Jealousy is much harder. Owning the feelings of jealousy and not using them against others requires self confidence and great control.

But jealousy cannot be completely removed unless love is also excised. That is, I don’t think there is a magic bullet for removing jealousy without practicing detachment. Detachment is like an adult emotional dummy spit. Sorry Siddhartha, but you were off the mark.

The harder but more rewarding road is accepting jealousy as a price for love. And then not fearing it and not hiding from it. True ‘detachment’ is accepting what you have now, but also being prepared to lose it in the future.

It sounds unfair and irrational, doesn’t it? Sort of like emotional quantum theory.* It’s one of those things that we can’t imagine but just have to accept as true. And once having done so, a few unexpected pieces will fall into place.

* – I was asked to explain this more thoroughly. I thought, what’s the point of wisdom that isn’t obscure? After all, the obscurity is there to force the grasshoppers to think about it rather than to read and forget.

Oh well, to be clear; if in fact you do have anything in a relationship that is worth being jealous about, solving that problem through jealous behavior will likely put your relationship into a state of irreparable dysfunction as a result of the underlying emotional and functional dishonesty that will inevitably follow.

You are better off either walking or sucking it up. But in each case you have to make it clear as to why you are doing what you are doing, and also what you are feeling. The point is that you can feel jealous without expressing the learned and destructive jealous behavior. This approach has the added benefit of not blowing up the 99% of situations where the jealous behaviour is mostly unjustified; much of what people get jealous about is unworthy of the fear of loss.

If you walk then don’t look back – this can’t be a threat. If you stay and the issue goes away then your emotional honesty will allow the relationship to recover properly so long as it is reciprocated.

Underlying this principle is the concept that the quality of a relationship is destroyed by unshared thoughts, feelings and actions. Even the ones that hurt should be shared otherwise partners start building up little corners that aren’t in the relationship. The accumulated little corners can eat away at the soul of a partnership like a cancer.

Australian VC again

Twice recently there have been calls for the Australian government to mandate capital flows into Australian venture capital.

One was a quickly rebutted argument that a fraction of Australian super funds be channelled thus.

The other, which still has legs, is that Chinese seeking a quick residency entry into Australia pay for that ticket via a government-mandated Hail Mary pass into Australian venture capital.

Behind these calls for capital flow against capital market logic there are two motivating forces:

1. By would-be managers of venture capital funds seeking a virtually risk-free access to management fees, and

2. By others that believe that the ‘problem’ with Australian venture capital is that there is in fact virtually no capital.

Ignoring the unholy former of these motivations, the second bears further contemplation.

There are those that believe that we can kick start a successful venture capital and tech sector industry by priming the pump with excess capital.

Since, as an industry sector, Australian venture capital has always had a negative IRR, a counter argument could be mounted that the more capital that flows into this industry, the lower the average IRR will be. That is, if there is more capital chasing the same deal flow then the average return on this capital has to diminish. This is pure logic.

A counter argument would be that ‘this time it will be different’. By some miracle the endemic problems will fix themselves. The problems being; poor deal flow, inexperienced first time managers that haven’t served a ten year apprenticeship, no exit market in Australia, no corporate buy into tech M&A in Australia, the distance from the key tech markets, under-sized funds, and the list goes on.

Personally I would like to see these problems addressed by any government mandate, along with the corralling of capital.

It probably won’t happen and, if not, in ten years time everyone will try it again, exercising the collective self-serving amnesia that they are practising right now.

Risk

I was chatting to a new colleague yesterday about his son’s career options.

The son is at a top-end private school and is looking at entering the finance sector, which he will be able to do in a snitch because of his classmates’ father’s networks.

I observed that this would probably offer a lucrative and safe career but this path runs the risk of his son getting to, say 50 years of age, and wondering what he in fact did with his life.

This seemed to strike a chord with my colleague.

He asked me if I felt like I had wasted my working career to date.

I said ‘no’ but for the life of me I couldn’t put into words why this is the case.

It’s an odd one; in principle there is nothing better or worse than this option or that option in life, so why did I say this and why did my colleague react like he did?

I don’t think it is necessarily about altruism – some people that I know that wear this on their sleeves are out and out unhappy folks, so the answer isn’t necessarily there.

This is why I write; until I feel for words on a plastic actuating array, and see them in a polarizing filter display, I often don’t get my thoughts sorted. And I just got it; it’s all about risk.

There has to be enough genuine risk in your life to make you feel alive. No risk, and the rot of disenchantment sets in, slowly white-anting your soul.

Sometimes I have felt like I have taken on too much risk (in work and in other ways) and it can overwhelm a soul when this happens.

However risk is like alcohol. You can slowly build up your tolerance to alcohol by indulging. So too you can also build up the your body and soul’s tolerance to risk.

6.58am

Sometime I am irresponsible for my own behaviour.

More lies

There’s a paradox in practicing the truth and it is this; if you are very honest with those that you love and you care about them then you may find yourself ‘editing’ yourself, your thoughts and behaviors, such that you never inflict pain.

This is the emotional equivalent of the practices of a good Christian who doesn’t sin and therefore has no need for confession. Possibly that Christian would be very bottled up and would carry their pain with them to the grave.

In life, there is no truth greater that “no pain, no gain”.

The good book, the new testament, should have had this written on the cover “these are just guidelines, lassy’. Or “don’t panic”.

My belief is that the means to escape this paradox is to own all your own pain even if you feel it is the fault of a loved one. They will eventually catch on, or not.

This was the central message of our good mate, Jesus the prophet. Hence, how ironic that his followers totally misunderstood him and turned his beliefs into rules.

Lies

My daughter is emotionally honest with herself and with others. She feels that lies are awful things that hang around like bad smells – she likes opening the window upon them.

But as she enters her teens she certainly is learning to exercise her right to withhold thoughts, feelings and information. She says this is because, for example, ‘you won’t understand’.

But in truth I think it’s because she isn’t sure what is true and what is not, with respect to certain thoughts and feelings.

And right there is the problem for the truth merchants.

Beliefs and feelings – these aren’t truths, they are our responses to the world and they are inherently flawed and often untrue, or at the very least, not someone else’s truth.

I have said to Lola that she might contemplate this set of rules that are almost true for me:

1. Don’t lie outright if you can avoid it

2. Lying by omission is equivalent to lying outright, whether you like it or not

3. Do not feel compelled to tell the truth; there is none. But share your beliefs and feelings with the people you love; don’t keep them to yourself.

4. Be very, very careful with people’s feelings – both the ‘truth’ and lies can hurt them – but protecting them from these feelings of hurt can hurt you more in the long run, and then everyone suffers.

5. People need to be made very comfortable with you in order to share their beliefs and feelings with you. If you want the ‘truth’ from the people around you then you have to actively show them that you are worthy and that you won’t ‘punish’ them for it. In this, the ‘once bitten, twice shy’ problem dominates – you have to practise great consistency and discipline.

And right there is an outline of some rules that could make every relationship just that much better. Thanks go to a certain friend of mine who helped me see these truths.

Grace free auto zone

This particular iron horse failed me last night. I had the satisfaction of kicking the thing. And I hurt my foot in the process. Grace free auto zone.

Irony Horse

There’s nothing autonomous or automatic about a car. No driver, crash.

It’s a wonder they were ever called ‘automobiles’, especially considering that their predecessors, the horses, were actually quite autonomous.

For instance, I once read an old story where a drunk’s mates’ placed him unconscious on his horse with some (probably drunken) comfort that he would be safely deposited at home. Splat.

There’d be a rule against that these days. The horse would get fined along with the publican, the mates, and even the drunk.

Google and others are working hard to make true automobiles – no hands self-driving autonomous cars.

Even so, do you think the fuckers are going to let us be in them with a few drinks under out belts?

Not a chance – we might touch the wrong button or something.

Really, what is the point?

Grace

Grace requires the second part of empathy – the caring that follows from the understanding of others – combined with an ability to reflect on one’s insertion into any social situation before it happens and get it right, and with no apparent effort.

The sentence above, for example, is middling for ‘grace’. It was harder to construct than I would have liked and the reader will have to think more than he or she should.

But then a Peter Carey, or similar, would have extracted a whole spaghetti-like novel out of it. And then he would be accused of being a genius, complete with praise for his graceful prose. And most readers would be none the wiser.

Moving on, I have a friend that completely lacks grace, and for all the wrong reasons. It’s for the wont of the caring part of empathy. In fact, this lack of grace is a mantra that he carries to cover for his inability to come up with a functioning life philosophy.

All you have to do is try, and try, and it will all come to you eventually. The harder it is, the more graceful the results will be.

IKEA

One of the oddest things about IKEA is that you can’t order their stuff from the Internet and have it delivered.

You have to physically go there to buy stuff – and there is an expensive delivery option but that still involves you carting stuff through the checkout.

Why do they do this? Well primarily so you get conned into ancillary purchases. By making you run through the complete rat-run that is their shop, they bank on a few unplanned purchases along the way.

And the cartage thing – well that’s just making their life easier and cheaper. Bloody lazy of them.

They already have a cheap model due to their scale and also the fact that they make their customers assemble the furniture. It’s a bit cheeky also being this uncaring of their customer’s real needs.

My forecast as to what will happen is this – someone will develop and internet business that copies IKEA products but where there is no shop. Just internet purchases and delivery. Customers will be able to go to IKEA to check out the products and then go online and purchase the stuff from this shadow website and app.

The only comeback IKEA will have is registered design on the products and copyright on the names of the products. These objections are easily obviated by making small non-functional and non-aesthetic changes to the design of the products and small changes to the names of the products.

Or, of course, IKEA could just give their customers what they really want, and offer this service before someone does them over.

What’s wrong with the current real estate system?

My mate Mike used to be a real estate agent and he has strong views on what is wrong with the current system. Here is a verbatim post of his thoughts on the subject:

“The current system is broken, agents are often fucked but are generally also fucked over, working for commission only, primarily they only get paid if you sell and they lose money if you don’t. Its a shit of an industry.

The way Agents are treated by both buyers and sellers mean invariably they need a very thick skin and must be prepared to apply high pressure to bring buyers and sellers together to close deals, they need to be emotionally detached from the result. A combinations of market forces means the agent often has to act in a way that no one likes to get a deal done.

Sellers are blinded to the value of their property and buyers are universally looking to get a bargain.

John McGrath once said to me that every market in Australia is the same, the seller thinks their property is worth 10% more than its true market value.

I used to hate auction but I am now a believer I think it should be used for all sales in all but a few high end specialist properties and even then it can bring a few buyers into competitive tension.

The auction puts a timeline on a sale process, if you are a buyer and like it you have to make a decision. Buyers don’t like this and it is in the vendors best interest as it really does encourage competition.

You would think this would scare buyers away but they will often be trying to get a deal done before the auction which I would be pushing hard (in the last 6 months I sold real estate I did about 6 like this and not one of them got to the auction day)

When you sell by private treaty there is no sense of urgency. The buyers don’t feel pressured. They don’t have to make a decision.

Time passes, Vendors get really tired of Saturday inspections by week 8, Vendors hate it and want to take it off the market, as they think the market is flat (in most cases its not), the lofty price ambitions are distant dreams.

The biggest mistake most Agents make is they cant tell the seller the truth about what the buyers think about the price of their property. In many cases if they do they either don’t get the listing or get sacked.

I have seen this go on for years which is in no ones interest (one property I sold I was the 3rd agent over 2 years, the previous two had let the buyer think they could get about $800k more than ANYONE was willing to offer for their terrace and that was before any building inspection revealed it was falling apart).

Time and time again I have seen properties over priced by 10-100% (yep, one falling down property with a view down in Mosman Bay, still isn’t sold 6 years later)

Vendors are their own worst enemy. In many cases they present a shit product, they significantly over price, are blind to the evidence of the markets activity (including seeing better properties sell for the same or less) try to list quietly to test the market (this is just crazy)

Extended time on the market means that inevitably the price degrades as everyone wonders what is wrong with it. (in many cases it was just overpriced)

If you don’t get it sold at auction, it gets stale and the price only goes down, its rare to get the best offer after an auction (the only exception to this is properties where the price is so high or the property so unique there isn’t a functioning market i.e. the buyers have stopped buying which often happens in top end property every few years)

While the current system is broken, it is by all accounts better than existing systems in other Western countries, the UK is a shit-fight and the US pays brokerage on both sides of the transaction and in some cases both seller and buyer are paying the same broker.

Your statement “Remember people pay what they can afford in a real estate transaction” is not what I have experienced.

People pay whatever they can get away with and are almost universally seeking to get a bargain until they realise they are about to miss out.

No one says lets offer above market price for this property (for one they want a bargain but more importantly they don’t know the market price until there is a competitive process to find it), the rare occasion is when a buyer just has to have it and either uses price or speed to get it, both a good result for the vendor.

In almost every transaction I saw the buyer had a little or a lot more in the tank when push came to shove, especially when there was competitive tension.

In almost every transaction I saw a buyer who believed the market was wrong about the price of their property.

This is where a negotiator/agent is the only way to get the best price and to get a deal done, a website is not going to pick up the phone and grind away at 20 interested parties until they have the best deal or meet with the best buyer for a coffee to convince them to make a higher offer to get the deal done or as I did in one stalled deal sit the two parties down for a beer and talk to them about the deal together until they shook over the table.

Except in the case of the top end where the market does stop buying for 6-12 months or if there has been a massive market shock ie recession almost none of the markets will be significantly different in 12 months, so if you didn’t get what you want now, its not going to be much different in a year.

But again the current model is broken, most of the agents are sub economic and earn less than the average wage, its only the top 5% that make very good money.

There has to be a better alternative and a web model is part of it, but I don’t believe you can discount the agents role in running a competitive horse race and squeezing every last dollar out of the buyers and at the same time providing evidence to the seller about what the market is really willing to offer (this is where most agents suck)

A good deal is where both parties are equally happy/unhappy about the price they got…..”

A 3rd party with skin in the game to get a deal done is pretty well the only way to bring them together.”

Real Estate Disintermediation

Have you ever bought a property in Australia?

Either the ‘For Sale’ or ‘Auction’ process, it doesn’t matter which one – they suck.

Neither of these processes are weighted fully in favour of the buyer or the seller. They are in fact weighted in favour of the real estate agent. Then the seller. Then the buyer. But remember most sellers quickly become buyers, so both groups are really being suckered by the agents.

Why so? Well, one might think that a happy seller, with a big result, is aligned with a happy agent. But their interests diverge. An agent is more sensitive to the time and resources required to execute a sale. A failed auction kills their margin. A long sales period does so too, as there are more costs accrued ahead of revenues. And they are juggling a portfolio of opportunities and prepared to cross-trade these at times.

All up, the agents manage to extract more money out of the process than is warranted. Remember people pay up to what they can afford in a real estate transaction – there is no true ‘market’ value for piece of land with a house on it; the competitive market defines the value. Under the current regime real estate transactions are a form of middle class welfare for real estate agents.

The buyers have all the money and hence they should have all the power. But they haven’t been able to exercise it for a lack of cohesion. Only the agents have full time focus and hence the cohesion needed to control the market in their own favour.

So here is a new suggestion as to how to change the system in favour of the buyers and sellers:

1. Set up a new real estate listing website.
2. Offer properties for sale with comprehensive inspection reports and contracts available on line.
3. This would allow people to buy online, with possible physical inspections prior to sale.
4. Have a one-bid closed auction process. Buyers would enter a single bid which is not published, and at the closing time the highest bidder would win the property.
5. Sellers could set reserve prices and these would be published. If no bids above the reserve are entered the highest under-reserve bid would have the first right to match the reserve. If that isn’t forthcoming the seller would have the option of re-listing the auction with a new reserve – there would be no old school mediated negotiations.
6. There would be an option for sellers to post a ‘buy it now’ price.
7. Sellers could place their properties privately on the site and freelance agents would be available on an hourly basis to manage any inspections. All other legal documents (contracts and inspection reports) would be arranged by the website and paid upfront by the seller.
8. The website could be a not for profit (if setup by a government agency) or a for profit, but with much less fee extraction than the current system. This would help it grab traction.
9. The website would use analytics to predict the actual sales price and post a continuously updated view of this. Eventually this would become so stable that all properties could just be listed with a ‘buy it now’ price and the auction process could become the option.

If buyers flocked to this site then pretty quickly the role of real estate agents is nixed. So they had better do it first before someone else does. Disintermediate yourself before someone else does.

Don’t you just love the internet?

Integrity, Empathy & Wealth

Integrity, empathy and wealth – they are all connected. Let me explain.

I have said before that empathy is a two-part process. First a person must be able to understand what another person is feeling. And secondly, that person must also care what a person is feeling, enough to actually feel for them without conscious effort, or to show physical concern, or even to extend a helping hand.

Integrity is one of those concepts that is best understood by describing what it is not. A person that is able to understand what another person is feeling and misuses that awareness, in my opinion, lacks integrity. In essence someone who lacks integrity is a mis-user of empathy – they ‘fake’ the second part of empathy for personal gain.

Interestingly, if we take this definition on board, then a lack of integrity can be for two reasons – one, a lack of understanding of the other person’s thoughts or feelings (and a subsequent harmful action in their direction), or a lack of caring as to how they feel as a result of one’s actions. See, it is very linked to empathy.

Wealth and integrity are somewhat inversely correlated. Or to put it another way, I have met more wealthy people, as a percentage of the breed, that lack integrity than other sorts. This makes me think that in order to achieve and/or maintain wealth a lack of integrity is a key character trait that offers efficacy.

I have met outliers of course and this observation doesn’t apply to all of them. And yet others have high integrity most of the time, but preserve their intermittent dark-side behaviour for those moments that really count, in a wealth generation sense.

Innovator v. Entrepreneur

Many people in my game make the mistake of thinking that innovators and entrepreneurs are the same beast, or at least heavily correlated.

They can be but they often are not.

I have seen many startups where the core concepts are provided by a very innovative technology founder who had zero entrepreneurial skills.

And then the investors inevitably parachute in a high quality entrepreneur who couldn’t innovate his or her (I saw a ‘her’ once) way out of a brown paper bag.

All an entrepreneur needs to be able to do is recognise the innovation of others.

In fact, it’s probably better that entrepreneurs don’t innovate themselves because we all unduly weight the importance of our own ideas.

Solar Flare

For some undefined period I have to practise not existing.

Whilst miserably contemplating this fact over a coffee, look what shuffled along and decided to sleep it rough, right in front of me.

OK. Ok. I get it.

VOIP dreaming

This is what Telstra finally figured out what their old phone boxes are good for… WiFi hotspots.

There’s enough left out there to make a difference – basically it relieves the pressure on their 4G network.

Wouldn’t it be nice if they made the phone calls from these phone boxes free of charge? After all they are sitting right on a VOIP opportunity, so it’s no cost to them.

The only people who would need to use them are those people who can’t afford mobile phones. So why charge them?