This morning I was introduced to a couple of people that I hadn’t met before.

One, a public servant, proffered an opinion; that he didn’t like me.

Confused, as I had never met him before, I asked why.

The answer had something to do with something I had written – what specifically I am not sure.

I suggested that he might actually try talking to me first before finalising his opinions about me because it might be a case that he would like me even if we disagreed on the subject of whatever it was I wrote.

Nuh. No way. Nicht.

I always think one should play the ball not the man. But I know this view is not universally shared.

Poor man, he will go through life hating strangers simply because he disagrees with their opinions.

I wonder what he does when one of his loved ones comes up with a contrary opinion?

Life must be hell for the intellectually rigid.

Interesting plot below. It’s Australia’s electricity consumption (per capita).

Notice the drop off in the last couple of years? Well this is accompanied by a flattening of total electricity demand and is due to the economic recession and the increased use of energy efficient technologies – things like LED light bulbs and many, many business initiatives that have been driven by cost saving incentives.

So in an environment where we have an effective drop off for demand in electricity we have also installed about 3 GW of solar panels, most of that in the last 3-4 years and exactly when demand has dropped off.

Much of the existing capacity is old power plants (e.g. coal burning) which has been fully depreciated and are therefore generating power at very low costs. New solar installations generate power at a cost of at least 2-3 times that of old coal burning stations despite the recent drop in solar costs.

So on one hand we are installing solar panels we simply don’t need from a demand point of view. But on the other hand solar panels offer far less carbon emissions.

Even weirder still, for some consumers, previously with subsidies and now substantially without, there is still an economic argument for installing solar panels.

This has a lot to do with peak pricing where the supply and demand is more favourable to self-consumption but also due to the fact that the power generators and distributors don’t mind doing a bit of cartel-style gouging.

The whole thing is pretty messed up and it doesn’t look like a favourable sector for financial investment to be honest.

If the current government really gets rid of the carbon tax and any residual direct incentives for solar, then they should, via a direct action, simply buy and ‘nuke’ a handful of the older and more polluting coal burning power stations.

This would create a ‘real’ market for new energy demand and on an ‘apples and apples’ basis solar and wind are actually cheaper, so they would win out. And we might get more gas burning distributed base-load generators at the same time.

And the wealth-creating economic benefit from a peak in infrastructure investment cannot be underestimated.

Sometimes I feel like an eskimo in snowstorm; there aren’t any like-minded souls out there…

This from the Business Insider “The association which represents Australia’s venture capital and private equity firms has come out swinging over today’s Commission of Audit report …AVCAL is worked up because one of the seven bodies the commission has marked for abolition is the Innovation Investment Fund. While the other program AVCAL was hoping to sneak through unscathed, the Commercialisation Australia program, also made the grants to be abolish list.”

Well I have a different view entirely. I think that getting the sick, sick patient (the Australian tech sector) off the drip will either force the patient’s immune system to kick in and we will see a recovery. Or the patient will die and leave room for some new organism to thrive, undistorted by the sins of the past.

I have documented the 30-year failure of government investment in venture capital. Seriously, did they expect the government to spend another decade in attempt to achieve the record of the longest failed experiment in the global history of all experiments in any field of science, technology or business? Actually I think they already have the record!

Just as an aside the longest successful experiment in science, technology or business is also Australian. It was started in 1927 at the University of Queensland. It’s just pitch dropping very slowly from a funnel. Since the experiment started there have been 8 drops of pitch of which only a couple have been observed. Which begs the question did the others really fall? So you see, it’s not just an ignoble experiment in stupidity but a philosophical experiment! Who would have guessed.

I guess the government, directly or indirectly, sponsored both programs, the longest successful and the longest failed experiments in science, technology and business. Which is in itself an interesting philosophical puzzle. Why us?

Commercialisation Australia (CA) on the other hand has had only a brief existence on this planet. It was introduced by one the previous Labor governments (probably Rudd, after the magnificent 2020 Summit) and pretty much replaced the old COMET scheme. Somewhere in their makeup both of these organizations started with the assumption that (a) startups companies in Australia have great ideas, but (b) our entrepreneurs are babes in the woods, and therefore (c) the COMET/CA selective input of time and money will fix all of their problems and they will go onto to becomes the next global technology giants. Yeah that worked, not!

Whereas I could stomach taking money off COMET (and there is no reason not to take free money off the government if it is on offer) I could never get myself to seriously try with CA. There were simply too many hoops to go through and too many conversations with patronising ‘consultants’ advising me on how to run my startups. Worst of all was the weirdness in the selection process; you had to simultaneously prove that you deserved and needed the money but couldn’t get it off anyone else, but that you had tried. This was some odd version of Schrodinger’s cat in a box experiment, once again proving our government doesn’t mind sponsoring philosophical experiments in the guises of science, technology and business.

Well in this instance, my friends, the cat is well and truly dead!

Query: do you control your emotions or do they control you?

For all of us the answer can change from moment to moment.

But I have met people for whom the answer is that their emotions control them when they least need them to.

And it makes their life complex.

I don’t have an answer to this problem. I am just contemplating it.

It is sometimes far more effective to contemplate a problem than it is trying to solve it.

Sometimes the problem just goes away.

And solving problems is hard work, whereas contemplation can be a gentle activity that doesn’t spoil your beer time.

Riding past one this morning I couldn’t help but think that surveyors and their trade are ripe for dis-intermediation.

Google will probably sponsor some activity that automatically surveys whole cities and then post the data on the web.

On almost any subject Wikipedia is far more informative than the direct source, e.g. company website, organizational blog or broadcast news.

Due to the democratic nature of input, and where there is a balance of feelings on a subject, neutrality of description is approached.

However one wonders whether various interest groups with far reaching power have already moved to constrain Wikipedia on the sly.

I bet they have.