Tech Sector Teletubbies

One hypothesis floating around is that our kids get so protected from the environment that they don’t develop sufficient immunity and end up with issues ranging from asthma to allergies. Another is that the over-use of antibiotics, extended breast feeding and crap diets is destroying certain key bugs in kid’s gut which are necessary for good immunity.

This hypothesis has been recently supported by a research effort that gave about 30 allergic children a daily dose of peanut protein together with a probiotic in an increasing amount over an 18-month period. The probiotic used in the study was Lactobacillus rhamnosus and the dose was equivalent to eating about 20kg of yoghurt each day. At the end of the trial 80% of the children could eat peanuts without any reaction from either their bodies or their mad mothers, compared to a 4% result from a placebo group.

Now to be be honest with you, I don’t give a flying fuck about peanut allergies. But this story reminds me of Australia’s economy. Let me explain…

We are 25 million people here in Club Australia living off a continent which would otherwise be good for 250 million people (yes it is – just think there’s 8m people in Israel; that is, a desert which is 370x smaller than Australia).

Resources and land – we have these in abundance and, well, why work hard on things like technology when there is an easy life to be had? So we end up living on an economic diet of carbs. And we have all the allergies in the world.

And our mother (the gub’ment) keeps us out of the dirt on a daily basis – for example, protecting us from the risks of losing our money in crowd equity funding or financial spread betting. And the result, we don’t lose our money and in the process we don’t learn how not to lose it.

In my sector, early stage tech, what I see when I look out the metaphorical window is a bunch of teletubbies playing in a kid’s bouncy castle, eternally protected by the mother from hell in Canberra that imagines potential peanut allergies in every white-shoe brigade proposal.

REPORT CARD: not ready for international competition just yet!