Monthly Archives: June 2016

Velib

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It’s official, the French and the internet are incompatible.

A key example is the Velib bicycle hire scheme in Paris.

If I had a room full of 80 year old Australians speccing a website/app/hardware system for consumer use I couldn’t have done worse.

The app is used only to find a bike and nothing else.

The website, which is in French only, has the most convoluted payment scheme known to mankind.

When you have finished with that you are emailed a number (which has various interchangeable names) and you must remember a PIN that you entered.

What you do with these is a mystery. My latest hypothesis is that you must enter them into the kiosk at the bike hire stations.

But that’s a guess I just tested.

I went to the kiosk, chose English as my language du jour and entered my numbers.

Halfway through the thing reverted to French but I managed to finish entering numbers using my lingering French knowledge and voilà; velocipede!

They can’t do bikes either, for what it counts. What a piece of crap.

But on the other hand, the left one, no helmets, a complete disregard for traffic lights, no traffic police, and bars coming out of the wazoo with more smoking areas than otherwise.

I call it evens…

Brexit through the gift shop

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I am holed up in a Parisian garret with a nasty cold. This is supposed to be a week of random tourism with my daughter and mother. They are off having fun (of a sort) and I am stuck in bed with my phone and computer.

With little else to do I have become somewhat fixated by the political meltdown in the UK following Brexit.

On June 24, the day after the referendum, I got this message from a business colleague in the London financial sector – “p.s. I hope you’re enjoying the Brexit debacle from the other side of the channel – it’s absolute carnage and disbelief over here.”

And there you go. That’s all it took for my interest to be properly piqued.

That and the fact that my German colleagues in Munich last week either (a) refused to discuss the then upcoming referendum, or (b) refused to engage in anything other than a religious-like debate on the subject, i.e. no rational counter argument to the ‘remain’ position was to be entered into.

Before I travelled to Europe I was aware of Brexit. I read the Guardian Online, hence I am exposed to a few more matters d’Angleterre than your average Sydney Morning Herald reader (that get served up an endless diet of Australian political gossip, various goings-on in the four football codes, and “6 ways to lose weight for summer”).

I had noticed, leading up to the referendum, that the arguments for ‘remain’ were getting progressively sillier and sillier, capped by my favourite – “Brexit problems for disabled passengers” wherein the author firstly noted that access for disabled people to UK airports had been made better by EU laws and therefore leaving the EU would makes things somehow worse.

In fact, the Guardian hardly ran any stories supporting ‘leave’, displaying an enormous bias by their editorial team.

The polls were predicting a win for ‘remain’ by a few points, as were the bookies, the whole of the London financial sector, and other self-interested parties lulled by the fact that voter conservatism usually wins out in complex national or international policy matters that are mystifyingly put to referenda.

Because I have been crook for a couple of days I have had ample time to bone up on the Brexit subject and now consider myself an expert.

I see two aspects to the matter; the kinetics and the thermodynamics (hijacking some very useful concepts from chemistry, of all things).

The kinetics, the “how did we get here”, are easy to explain. Politicians in the UK are pretty much like politicians in Australia; Pavlovian dogs with nothing better to eat than their own regurgitated egos.

So when you have dozens of them, each using the Brexit issue to advance its own cause, you have a dog’s breakfast of a process that could and did go where no one expected it to. I won’t name names; that has been done by others and the main culprits are well known to all.

And I say ‘culprits’ because the debate on the matter wasn’t very informative and often was deliberately misleading and self-serving. Not in anyone’s interest, that.

More interesting to me is the thermodynamics of the situation. That is, why is over half of the population of the UK so pissed off that they would vote themselves out of the EU? Or off the island, out of the house, or anything…

And then the Guardian came to the rescue. They reported some plots of various voter characteristics versus how these people voted in the referendum.

And the biggie was income – the lower the income bracket the greater the percentage of people that voted ‘leave’. It was a pretty linear correlation.

There were some other trends to note as well. Education levels mirrored income levels. Age had little correlation despite all the stories claiming otherwise.

There was also a plot showing “% residents not born in the UK”. This only highlighted that those not born in the UK had an ‘outlier’ group that were rationally in favour of ‘remain’, but did little to support the leave/racism hypothesis.

Now being trained as a physical chemist I am always very careful when interpreting data. We were taught that a correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation, unless you are a journalist, an economist or a politician.

So I first want to emphasise that what follows is, at best, a hypothesis.

Together, automation in manufacturing and Asian manufacturing have cruelled much of the working labour market in the UK. The government (in various forms) hasn’t appropriately stepped in to create sufficient artificial jobs in the services sector through ‘nanny state’ regulations. We are much better at this in Australia by the way.

So the folks in London are doing just fine, having a glorious time trading away in the services sector, but keeping most of the proceeds for themselves.

How do they do this? Well, the wealth creation has increasingly been concentrated in certain segments of society and the mechanism of taxation that act to collect and then distribute this wealth haven’t been adapted to account for the changes in where the wealth is generated.

Call it neoliberalism if you will. I just call it greed mixed with power, and a heavy dose of stupidity. You can avoid democracy in a democracy for a while, but eventually it will come and bite you in the arse.

As it did on June 23, 2016.

My hypothesis is that Brexit was passed because the ‘remain’ crowd were so obviously on one side of the debate. The disenfranchised seem to inexplicably care more for their national football team than the EU. Even so, this was an easy target to hit, once recognised.

The ‘remain’ proponents would have been far better advised to stay very quiet and not make an issue of the whole thing. The more shrill they became, the more obvious their self-interest.

Thus, so armed, the disenfranchised have well and truly sent the message to London.

However, in terms of an approach to solving the problem, it’s akin to completely missing the nail with the hammer, losing one’s grip and beaning the foreman with the thing.

Oops, sorry mate!

What next?

My suggestion is that the situation needs a little leadership.

The UK has a chance of staying as the UK and of staying in the EU, but only if someone steps up and first addresses the wrongs of three decades of rampant neoliberalism that have left over half the population well and truly behind.

Any while they are at it, they may as well have a shot at fixing up the EU as well. I mean what sort of organisation creates a multi-national common currency and monetary policy without a corresponding common fiscal policy? If I were a member alongside this bunch of dopes, I’d apply the Groucho rule and look for the EUxit.

Invention of the Day

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A drone that replaces a pram. Stick your kid in it and it just follows you (well your phone to be exact) around.

Imagine if you lived in a Parisian block of flats with no elevator. You could just open the window to allow egress of the pram-drone and then whip downstairs to join your kiddie at the pavement.

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Rust

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Due to circumstances way outside my control I find myself directly under the Tour Eiffeil, having just escaped its clutches.

7 million visitors a year they tell me. 20,000 per day. Queues a mile long.

The French, observing the two hour queues, rather than fixing the problem have decided to monetise it.

Essentially you can, for a 10x cost, queue-jump.

They have created derivatives on tourist queues! They are now an asset and not a problem.

Having jumped the big queue and spent 20 minutes in the little queue, been through two layers of particularly useless securite, taken one elevator to floor two, endured a 20 minutes tour that came with the accelerated tickets, queued for another hour, taken another elevator to the top, I decided to bail straight away.

Why?

I’m not particularly scared of heights, nor crowds.

No, this was culture-phobia mixed with ferric oxide-phobia.

Fuckwits and rust, if you will.

With a bit of luck 20,000 of the former will succumb to the latter one day very soon.

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Mobile Voting

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Excitedly, I thought I could finally vote via an app. But no, nothing so modern. They take the polling booth to you instead…

“AEC mobile polling teams visit many electors who are not able to get to a polling place. Mobile polling facilities are set up in some hospitals, nursing homes, prisons and remote areas of Australia. Mobile polling is carried out around Australia prior to election day and on election day.”

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Principal Agent

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Twere I a politician facing a budget in deficit, rather than picking winners or losers, I’d just cut every bureaucratic department’s budget by the same required percentage in order to balance the books.

The departments would undoubtedly find the required cost cutting measures with the least impact on their remit.

Let’s call this approach anti-clientelism.

The voters would have little to quibble about since all their pet handouts would be getting equal treatment.

The opposition, they would have only the moon to rage at.

And for the politicians, a facile life without undue rancour.

It is usually a mistake to believe that the complex solution is the best one.

And good leadership normally requires full delegation combined with very simple, high level decisions.

However it is no surprise that such a solution has never been proposed.

Politicians are by their nature addicted to the façade of control and to the attention, both negative and positive, garnered by playing God; this despite the fact that they are usually wonderfully unqualified in their attempts, just so.

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Sanga of Death

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Air France just gave me a cheddar cheese sandwich with Cajun sauce.

It’s amazing what they managed to squeeze into the thing. Check out the ingredient list below.

If you think that’s easy to do, think again. In terms of R&D effort it must have been as big as the Manhattan Project.

Full credit to Bergams (the manufacturer) for pulling it off within the 90g limit.

And full marks to Air France for offending every possible card-carrying American allergy sufferer.

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rIPOff

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In the equity markets it’s always been said that the dumbest money is in the public markets.

The outcome of this? IPOs where the price per share is way higher than in any private form of capital raising.

This implies that public markets aren’t smart enough to properly assess risk. This is in fact the case despite all the efforts to force companies to properly disclose all risk factors.

Public markets, on the subject of business risk, are in fact even dumber than patent attorneys that are senior associates and principals. Which is saying something.

Current equity partners in Australian patent attorney firms are cashing out via IPOs ahead of a situation where they can’t sell their shares, at retirement, to senior associates at an acceptable price. Or any price.

What the senior associates vaguely recognise is that their market is shrinking in both size and profitability.

The public market seems to have no idea of this.

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Oops, sorry mate…

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Democracy was the ‘winner’ of the whole Brexit thingy.

Automation and Asia has cruelled the working labour market in the UK and the government hasn’t stepped in appropriately to create sufficient artificial jobs through nanny state regulations.

When folks feel like others are doing much better, and unfairly so, you will see a rise in racism and suchlike. People just love sharing their unhappiness.

Thus, so disenfranchised, the message has been sent to London.

In terms of an approach to solving the problem however, it’s akin to completely missing the nail with the hammer, losing one’s grip and beaning the foreman with the thing.

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Could this app get any worse?

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In truth, I’ve never noticed eye movements in myself that are associated with any sort of mental processes.

Apart from the impact of excessive alcohol, that is. Oh, and the left one micro-twitches if I’m super stressed and tired.

Ignoring these; I’d noticed if there was any sort of association.

I suspect I’m one of those people whose eye movements are mostly decoupled from brain activity.

Probably by some evolutionary form of cerebral gas shocks with inverted springs and rubber dampeners.

Which means that I can’t cargo cult myself into either healing or having conceptual flashes just with enforced eye movements.

It’s probably why I am un-hypnotisable as well.

Moving on, this app is getting worse with every upgrade. As is the Google Swype keyboard. Between them, these apps are now just about unusable. FFS people, it’s not that hard! (micro-twitch)

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Lights, action

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Advancing the theme … when in doubt;

Step 1: Rub the third eye Chakra, then if needed;

Step 2: Breathe deeply and slowly for 2 minutes, then if needed;

Step 3: Meditate for 10 minutes, then if needed;

Step 4: Have a shot at EMDR

After that I suggest recreational drugs.

After the morning after, repeat from step 1.

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Third Eye

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When I am beset by certain sorts of stresses my strain response is to rub the gap between my eyes.

Otherwise known as the third eye chakra.

According to a bunch of Indians, the “way of the third eye” is seeing everything as it is from a point of “witness” or “observer”, or from simply being mindful – moment by moment.

That’s about right; it’s me removing myself from the world to make sense of the insanity that is assailing me.

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Binary Morons

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Folks in the UK were asked if they agreed or disagreed with the statement “human activity is causing climate change.”

Variably the Guardian has used these numbers to argue that those fuckwit (that’s me, para-adjectiving) Brexit supporters, on the subject of some generic climate change hypothesis, are twice as likely to disbelieve / distrust / doubt / oppose / not support / think (that it’s wrong).

It never occurred to the Guardian that disagreement with the statement could have be a sign of a rational person that knew they didn’t have enough data, training, skills or interest to properly agree with the tricky and under-defined proposition, and hence, with no other option available, were forced to disagree.

Which just shows why you shouldn’t answer a binary (yes/no) question. Nor should you ask one!

Any forced binary answer to a complex question may be used by those harboring irrational emotions (and that also constructed the binarised complex question) in order to accuse you of the same.

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Alien

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Microsoft buys LinkedIn.

Apart from the fact that LinkedIn is one of the most under-utilised assets on the internet, this purchase is a key part of Microsoft’s plan to do an ‘Alien’ on Android; build a series of apps that have wide access to the Android (and Apple) phones.

After all, it’s Google’s very own strategy to hollow out Windows and eventually replace it.

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Extremely Vulgar Awakening

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Just what do you think my Chinese friends are trying to say to me?

“Electrode Duan fair and good heart is not part of Yong Su person. Is the awakening conscience of Wei Ling Hun large. Extreme Gong Zheng words and Shan good heart is not part of De vulgar people. Liang De awakening heart is the soul of greatness. Not ridicule Valley brand-hole Gang miscellaneous Dou Ya Ping Que off all flattering regret Kong – extremely fair and good heart is not Shu Yong Su in person. Awakening of conscience on the soul De Shi Wei Da. Extreme impartial. He is not a good heart De vulgar person. Liang heart Jue Xing soul is great. Extreme justice and goodness DeXin is Bu belong vulgar person. Xing Jiu conscience is the soul feel great. Extremely fair and good heart is not Shu Yu Yong Su person. Conscience awakening to spiritual Hun De Shi Wei Da. Zheng and associated extreme public good heart does not belong to Yong vulgar Ren. Conscience is the soul of the great awakening. Department of extreme Gong positive He Shan good heart is not a vulgar person. Liang Xin De awakening is the soul of greatness. People extremely fair and good heart Shi Liang does not belong to vulgar person. De conscience awakening JiuShi great soul. Zhang Bo Zhao Bo vent worthy fight flesh Kang Xian extreme slope just and good heart Shi Bu genus Yu Yong vulgar person. Conscience awakening to Shi Ling Hun De great. Raw”

No picture could do this one justice…

Scramble

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For sheer old school entertainment I love the business pages. Not the articles, but for the pictures.

For example, the exhibit below is meant to suggest that our beleaguered CEO is shackled to the desk in worldly contemplation as to how to get his shareholders out of the unholy mess he has got them into.

Whereas in fact he is probably spending the day on the blower to his wife’s broker, desperately trying to dump the stock.

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Pathological

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Pathological: involving or caused by a physical or mental disease.

That is, when we accuse someone of behaving ‘pathologically’ we are actually proffering reduced responsibility for their behaviour because of a disease.

What springs to mind is that this is yet another example of how we humans avoid responsibility by blaming the ‘bad other’, in this case a ‘disease’.

Two extreme cases come to mind: one, a friend who takes drugs for the bipolar conditions, and another that has made a habit of cutting the grass of (what are now) former friends and lovers.

I can’t help but think, as we get more and more sophisticated in our social structures and behavioural expectations, that a larger fraction of people will either not be able to fit in, or if they do, they will do so quite unhappily.

They just don’t have the training, the wherewithal, or the will.

Which is to say, we collectively are our very own ‘bad other’.

It would be quite reasonable to suggest that those that do fit in to society are therefore doing so quite pathologically.

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Subversive

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Banksy paints on his local school wall and tells the students ‘change away guys’.

School adds at least half a million dollars worth of art to its balance sheet.

School board says insure it.

Insurance company says add some security or your premiums are through the roof.

School builds a room around the artwork.

Students go … aha.

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Do not leave that kid alone

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I have come to the conclusion that schools have got it right.

They teach kids whatever are the currently accepted and conservative set of
truths.

They also do not promote questioning or critique except those that are currently accepted as historical developments that led to the currently accepted and conservative set of truths.

Then the handful of rebels that see through the hypocrisy rattle around in their cages and eventually retire to trailer parks.

Or, if mildly organised, become academics that rattle around in their cages and eventually retire to bungalow parks.

Thus the value of the new is confined to productivity gains and the cost of the new is constrained to the margins, as it should be.

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The missing ‘l’

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In times of abundance we humans become more attached to ideas than ideals.

Which makes us susceptible to manipulation because ideas are far less open to critique than ideals.

It’s possibly the other way around; in times of abundance we feel less the need to critique and naturally attach to ideas.

Ideals are just collateral damage.

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Parenting

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One should go through life not regretting one’s choices but learning from them.

That’s a meme that I made up for my daughter, sans imagery. Not bad for an on-the-spot effort.

Truth be told, there’s more than a couple that I regret. Especially the recidivist efforts.

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Praise

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This week, after a fair bit of research and trial, I have started using two new CRM packages.

Both are web-apps with accompanying phone apps, and both are brilliant.

PipeDrive replaces our former CRM (some clunky enterprise dinosaur) and is just fantastic for sales teams.

ProsperWorks replaces my Google spreadsheets where I kept a track of all my bus dev activities.

This last one is an absolute beauty and would work just as well for sales as PipeDrive. But PipeDrive’s phone app is slightly better suited for sales.

What I love most about ProsperWorks is that it’s 100% integrated into Google apps and chrome. It just works.

Software well done boys!

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Raspy and Word Weary

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Here’s an editorial of a new book that Amazon Kindle wants me to read:

“Laura Esquivel, author of international bestseller Like Water for Chocolate, creates unforgettable characters who breathe off the page, and it is my pleasure to introduce you to Lupita, the raspy, road-weary voice of Esquivel’s highly anticipated new novel, Pierced by the Sun. Like most of us, Lupita has never had it easy. She works as a cop in a corrupt Mexican police force, and day after day she struggles to live up to her own expectations. She has invented her own demons, and to conquer them she must travel deep into herself, literally and figuratively.”

I have issues with … “who breathe off the page” (that what?), “raspy, road-weary” (means nowt to me), “highly anticipated” (no it’s not), “Like most of us, Lupita has never had it easy” (yes we have), and “literally and figuratively” (stating the bleeding obvious – it’s a book).

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State of Finality

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After watching Origin I, it occurs to me that there’s a lot of similarities between the codes of Australian politics and Rugby League.

Apart from the fact that in both codes one can only pass backwards and play stops every time anyone is tackled, in the modern era they have both become slug fests.

The actors have been trained to within an inch of their lives and there’s no free flowing back line activity any more.

Indeed, in last night’s game there were maybe three examples of players doing risky things such as the chip and chase, or the speculative cut-out pass, and the like.

In all three cases the ball was lost thus reinforcing the concept that possession, front row runs and low-risk footy  is the way to go.

In politics the same is true although it hasn’t got quite to the same degree of sophistication as yet, with the odd back bencher and nutty minister regularly opting for the risky chip and chase.

Fortunately for both teams in the political code there isn’t much chance of another team breaking into the duopoly of origin, so winning the game is predicated on minimising mistakes.

Being as boring as that is, it is no wonder that the good footballers (in the case of rugby league) and the talented all rounders (in the case of politics) eschew both codes in favour of rugby union/AFL or business, respectively.

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Slug Fest

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Laurie’s onto something; rugby league would be far more entertaining if there were no refs at all. After all, as kiddies we used to play park footy without refs. Through some weird democratic process the rate of bad decision making wasn’t any higher than Origin.

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Orb Logic

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Female orb spiders eat their mates after or during sex about 80% of the time. Apparently the fellas have to go into a pack of females (Kafka should have picked this one up) where they tend to pick the young plump virgins. The biologists believe this is because there’s a greater chance of conception. It hasn’t occurred to them that the blokes are just picking the inexperienced ones so as to improve their chances of getting into the 20%.

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