Recently Philip Morris challenged Australia’s tobacco plain packaging legislation citing a 1993 agreement between the governments of Australia and Hong Kong for the promotion and protection of investments.

Philip Morris Asia argued that Australia’s tobacco plain packaging measure constituted an expropriation of its Australian investments in breach of Article 6 of the agreement.

It further argued that Australia’s tobacco plain packaging measure was in breach of its commitment under Article 2(2) of the agreement to accord fair and equitable treatment to Philip Morris Asian investments.

It also asserted that plain packaging constituted an unreasonable and discriminatory measure and that Philip Morris Asian investments had been deprived of full protection and security in breach of the agreement.

Me thinks Philip Morris should have taken a different route.

They could have argued false and misleading advertising on two counts by the Australian government, thus breaching their own legislation on the subject:

1. Firstly, there’s nothing ‘plain’ about the packaging, and

2. Secondly, the government’s claims of health issues relating to cigarettes are grossly overstated. For example, compare the two images below; you’d have a better chance of picking up the chick than you would of getting the gangrene.

One benefit of age is the knowing that no matter what pain you’re feeling, time will cure it better than any plan or even any unplanned course of action.

There’s the knowing this is true, in your bones, which is very different from being told it’s true.

Dots, we can join them up, us humans.

But some dots can only be joined through hard earned experience.

Somewhere in there is a definition of wisdom.

Rule of thumb; take a single data point and use it to confirm whatever prejudices you are nurturing.

If for some reason you get a data point that doesn’t fit then use that as confirmation bias that your confirmation bias is right at all other times.

After all, rules are defined by their exceptions.

Vanity does not follow the Pareto rule, unfortunately.

After about 20% of the effort the return curve flattens off and eventually heads downhill into negative territory.

School Application Form Question: As a parent(s) what is the most important thing you want for your child for his/her High School experience?

My answer: Father’s view – I would prefer my daughter to have a challenging but happy time at High School. Values that are important to me are: cultural diversity, free thinking, rational thinking, high quality writing, social empathy and alternative views to the current focus in our society of materialism and nanny state protectionism. I do note of course that my personal views may not be now, or in the future, shared by my daughter.

Walloper, leaning out of his car window, “you know this is a one way street?”

Me, “no I did not, who’s going the wrong way, you or me?”

The closer that a society comes to crisis, the more aggressively it seeks out those that not only speak the truth, but that also have genuine solutions to the crisis.

War is an obvious example.

In a documentary that I watched the other day, during WW2 Hitler repeatedly turned to Ferdinand Porsche for engineering solutions because Porsche was a genius that could create amazingly unexpected solutions.

It says something about Hitler too; he could obviously recognise and promote rare talent.

Hitler wanted a tank that was 10x bigger than any other and to achieve this Porsche invented the diesel-hybrid-electric drive to save the weight of the gearbox (weight being an issue in the bogging of the big heavy tank). This revolutionary drive train wasn’t re-used until the 90’s when Toyota introduced the Prius.

I think I’m going to have to find a good book on the subject of Ferdinand.

To book-end the opening remark, if there is no crisis then there is no need for those that carry the truth, nor those that have the less-than-obvious solutions.

Australia in 2015; it would appear that we are in crisis, if you care to listen to the media. Terror, Economic Collapse and Climate Change; the sky is falling in.

But it isn’t really.

Unfortunately our politicians have learned to peddle crisis chatter in order to help them get re-elected. Our media is short of content in their 24/7 reporting cycles so they mega-phone this trash-talk.

The only thing that prevents us from being fully dilated by all these crises is the needs of the local services business sector. This non-voting lobby group that represents about 70% of our GDP wants consumer confidence promoted and crises silenced, so that revenues and profits keep growing.

The truth is that there is no crisis:

1. Climate change – we are well placed to weather the storm  in Australia. We’re a big country with very few people and, in any case, the rest of the world will deal with this issue for us.

2. Terror – we know it’s not a real problem because if it was we wouldn’t hear about it. The best way to promote terror is to incessantly report on it.

3. Economy collapse – apparently we are just about buggered. Resources are down and we are out of export opportunities so we need to ‘innovate’ before we become the next Sudan. Yeah if you believe that the you may as well believe in Santa Claus. The truth is that we have enough land and resources to sell off (to whichever the next developing economy is) such that we will be luxuriating in consumer gadgets for the next few centuries

If there is a crisis in this country it is a moral one. But to accept this you would have to agree that greed and stupidity represent a moral crisis. And if you are greedy and stupid you would be very unlikely to accept that you are greedy and stupid. Unless you were loopy, in which case you would be shunned. And if you weren’t greedy and stupid you would be labelled as loopy and shunned anyway.

If a crisis does head our way it’s going to be damned interesting watching a nation of greedy and stupid people adapting to it. My guess is that it wouldn’t be pretty.

A quick precis of a key point that I made in a conversation yesterday:

“The true art of an entrepreneur is not only having great ideas but ignoring them and only exploiting the great ideas of others”

Odd isn’t it?

An entrepreneur is by his very nature is an ‘ideas man’ (pardon the gender specific nature of this sentence, but that’s a reference to The Castle).

And yet, the successful entrepreneur has learnt the discipline of ignoring her own ideas and sponging good ones off others (see, I am good at the gender balancing).

It’s all about managing risk – the risk of not being able to effectively argue with yourself while assessing your own ideas.

In fact, minimising risk is one of the primary skills of an entrepreneur. It’s just as important as the ability to take a risk.

I have in my time met successful pseudo-entrepreneurs that have had one good idea, gone for it, and made it work.

I can assure you, they could never do it again. And some of them are even smart enough to know this; not many of them though.

FFS, but we knew it was coming. Time to get out of this fucking place.

Whilst having a beer with Tony I told him that I was a fan and that he should make a comeback.

I was being truthful.

Apart from being very entertaining, Tony was a train wreck for consumer confidence upon which our services-led economy feeds.

This meant depressed consumption, less greenhouse gas emissions, less foreign debt, and downward pressure on the Australian dollar, which is good for me since I run an export business.

If the economy was depressed for long enough, in sheer desperation some others might actually start figuring out how to develop and export high tech products and services.

So you see, if you could look past the embarrassment factor, Tony was good for us.

Malcolm the Second, on the other hand, has learned from his prior failures in politics that his is a role in which he cannot depart from the script.

He will appease the business sector and the proletariat by measuring every action by its impact on promoting consumer confidence.

And there will be absolutely no serious effort to create real change of any sort in the economy except to increase the GST so that government can do even more inefficiently that which shouldn’t be done at all.

A group of hippopotamuses or hippopotami or hippos (they are all correct) is called a pod, a herd, a dale, or a bloat, although they answer to none of these.

When Lola was very little, while watching some animal show, she asked me what a hippo critter was, wondering if the 2 tonne charging beast on the LCD was indeed such a thing.

I had to explain that a lot of words in English that sound similar are in fact unrelated and that the word hypocrite derives from ancient Greek word for acting, not a over-sized swimming horse.

The hippo’s closest living relative is the whale, which explains the ‘pod’.

The ‘herd’ makes sense since they are sort of horse like and hang around in bunches.

And ‘bloat’ is self explanatory.

It’s the ‘dale’ that confuses me. I must recuse myself to my own explanation and assume that these collective nouns were fabricated by a bunch of Victorian hypocrites.

No harness; I don’t know, it doesn’t look like a good idea to me.

Ooooo this is exciting…

Inexplicable wall art as viewed from the couch from which my head refuses to budge. Another Hong Kong paradox.

Now there’s an idea; IP Australia, in a bid to sexy itself up and get a bit of mainstream attention, could launch the Australian Patent Academy Awards.

It’s not like the awards need to be based on any form of logic; hardly any of the others are, e.g. the Eurekas or the PM’s various awards.

Which is a good thing since the only award that matters for patents is the value in dollars of the monopoly granted, or the proceeds from enforcement. Of which neither IP Australia or Nantong city has any inkling.

And you’d have to admit, we are a bit skinny on awards in Australia. There should be one major award per head of population per year I reckon.

Those Chinese, they don’t have a word for irony.

This is the first watch I’m building with my new watch company. Designed it myself using Gimp, which is the open source version of Photoshop. Now all I have to do is turn that into 3D CAD using the new app which we’ve only just started.

Yesterday, at a Chinese business lunch I was accused of looking like Pierce Brosnan. Lacking other options I took it as a compliment.

Two goldfish, one fishing line and tackle, a glazing of river weed, three bubbles, a plate and one Lazy Susan, known as a rotary pan (direct translation) in China.

Previously I had been lied to under the influence of rice spirits and led to believe that there is no Chinese name for such a rotating contraption.

Now why would the local communist party secretary in province 2542799 commute such a fabrication?

Tell me, is it harder to express humanity towards strangers or towards friends?

Hang on, with friend it’s empathy and with strangers it’s humanity.

There’s a clue there I think; humanity in the broader sense may be the sum of all empathy.

Or at the individual level it could be empathy, projected onto strangers.

My guess is that those who are naturally empathetic are more likely to naturally express humanity, compared to those that express a forced form of humanity but that are less likely to be genuinely empathetic to friends.

A guess; humanity can’t exist without humility. And humanity is a cousin of empathy which must also need some form of humility.

And just to prove that gambling is an addiction that can’t be controlled by any form of logic, casinos, in an effort to lower costs, are introducing robotic croupiers.

I for one would have liked to see a rotating head and an open mouth on the robot, porn doll style, so customers could pop in the odd ping pong ball for a special jackpot.

I’ve been struggling for sometime to come up with a good definition of innovation.

Why does it matter? Only because the word innovation is being thrown about by all sorts of people just at the minute and very few of them have any clear idea as to what they mean upon the utterance.

Vaguely, they will mumble, it implies something new-ish and that is also of value to someone, or someones.

More definitely they will say that promoting it will lead to good economic outcomes by means that are somewhat mysterious.

And most assuredly the promotion of it necessarily implies a government grant or tax cut, a government paid job, or similar. Without such a blood sacrifice the spirits of innovation can’t be bribed into working their magic.

So I have decided, after much review, that innovation can be defined thus:

Any government funded activity that aims to create positive economic outcomes but rarely does, and that can be publicised as being an activity (n.b. not an outcome) that is either new-ish or mostly forgotten.

Chasing truth and evading capture; insomnia is a powerful metaphor but a fucking useless aphrodisiac.

It’s hard to know where to start with this one.

But you’d have to agree that zero is less than thirty and therefore logically included in the ‘up to 30’. And you’d have to be mad to apologise for not stabbing your local neurosurgeon.

Unless he did a shit job; then it’s on him.

Today’s odd excursion into la la land.

KP, surprisingly I’m with you on this one – see story below. It’s happened to me once and I couldn’t get in to collect my free newspaper.

However, the ‘no thongs’ rule in the Qantas lounge is designed to keep as many of the bogans out as possible. They simply drink too much of the free grog and they aren’t wanted in this particular buffet.

Essentially our society has five strata defined by their preferred airline;

1. Qantas – the deluded conservatives
2. Virgin – the noveau riche
3. Jetstar – your bog standard bogans
4. Tiger – ultra-bogans, the unemployed and the mentally unstable
5. Rex – that odd collective of rural dwellers, clearly also suffering mental issues, that haven’t migrated to the suburbs yet

Qantas filters out the undesirables in the other four categories by high pricing, their ambience (which makes bogans oddly uncomfortable), condescending geriatric staff, unbearable muzak, and the no-thongs rule. It’s all they’ve got.

The only problem with this story is that the prawns in the photo haven’t been peeled. And right there is your solution; eschew the peel and keep the slavery to the prawns, mate.

This appeals to me for reasons I cannot fully explain.

Panerai are an old brand of upmarket Italian slash Swiss watches that are avidly collected by wealthy business folk.

You can buy new ones, and many do, but it’s the old ones that aficionados really lust after.

The founder of Panerai knew Marie Curie and shortly after she discovered radium he figured out how to mix it with copper-doped zinc sulfide to make a glow-in-the-dark watch.

Which just happened to kill everyone involved in making the watches and everyone that wore them.

The old Panerai watches don’t glow anymore because the zinc sulphide crystal structure has been degraded by all that radium which is still emitting it’s radiation and will do so for the next few aeons.

But the best bit is this …

The office of Buddha is closed for an IT overhaul.

The database is being wiped and allowed to reincarnate as whatever the fuck it wants, possibly as an ad server for Redtube.

Buddha himself has retreated to the dunny with a Readers Digest which has an interesting lead story on miracles that stunned doctors.

The marketing team is holed up an off-site in Ubud considering the merits of a definitive tome.

The finance team are in California brokering a micro payment deal with PayPal.

And the strategy team have been sent to Sweden to negotiate options for a proposed co-branding campaign with Ikea.

Taking advantage of the absence of whiny Western Buddhists, solar panels are being installed on the roof of the Indian HQ in what looks like a haphazard pattern but which has been carefully arranged to prevent further leaks.

The grand plan is to relaunch after the Paris Accord with carbon credits guaranteed for certified practising adherents.

An app is being developed, Reincarbonate, so followers can track their progress up the food chain and into the next life.

And a plan for a new carbonated coconut water drink with the same name, sourced from the low hanging islands of Tuvalu, is being hatched under a licence deal with Pepsi.

An IPO is planned for 2020 with the capital raised to be used to mop a few other minor religions in an attempt to solidify fourth place in global market share.

The ultimate strategy is to attract the faithful of the fastest growing category of pseudo-religious faiths, materialism, before the three market-leading incumbents wake up to the flaws in their old-school legacy products and their total lack of R&D budgets.

Bugger craft, this lot’s targeting art.

Clearly named after the band and not the practise.

I would say to Muslims, don’t worry we in Australia always deal with our racism. Eventually.

I met a woman the other day and the best thing I could say about her was that she nicely defined her cavities.

There is nothing so useless as doing now that which should not be done at all.

We need a new word; evadericate – to speak or act in an evasive way for bloody good reasons.

Prevaricate without the pejorative.

In the 1990’s we were the ‘smart’ country.

Then in the 2000’s it was the ‘knowledge’ nation.

Now we’re the ‘innovation’ nation

The truth is that since the 90’s high tech exports shrank and shrank, down to just over 1% of our exports.

That’s not too smart.

Google’s taken care of knowledge.

And just about the only thing innovative about Australia is the government marketing that attempts to create the impression that the opposite is true.

It reminds me of the City of Sydney signs plastered with the logo ‘City of Villages’.

Clearly untrue, no one seems particularly perturbed that this unachievable aspirational goal is promoted as a reality.

The only conclusion that I can draw is that Australians are so used to fabrications that don’t matter that the fabrications simply don’t matter.

Which begs the question, why does anyone bother with them at all?

The answer is that all this people in the marketing sector that are efficiently beavering away at that which should not be done at all aren’t particularly smart or innovative.

Hence they must just look to, say, Germany for their next nation-building branding exercise.

It probably takes them 5 minutes on Google to come up with their next decade long theme.

At least they got the knowledge bit right.

For a man that can hardly stand and talk this is a bit of a BHAG.

You can see the headline coming; “opposition leader killed trying avoid to a policy.”

Alan Jones tells Tony Abbott that he has been subject to “vilification from the media class and pretty feral opposition in the Senate.”

I would like to point out that the Federal Anti-Vilification Act makes it “unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person, or of some or all of the people in the group.”

I reckon Tony and Alan ought to start a movement to get this extended to acts done because of the stupidity, forgetfulness, egocentric nature, meanness or lack of irony of some or all of the people in the group.

Then they’d have a legal case to chase. Otherwise it’s just a case of calling a spade a fucking idiot.

Herman Melville was onto something. If they can train cockroaches to carry little go-pros and surreptitiously enter hostage situations why not train whales to carry comms systems and the odd inter-continental ballistic missile?

Sandy Hook, Dec 14 2012.

Since that atrocity more than 90,000 Americans have been shot and killed with guns; more than 210,000 have been shot and injured; and there have been more than 1000 mass shootings where four or more people have been shot at one time.

There’s something very, very weird about the US. They seriously need some bullet control but have got totally sidetracked by the gun control debate.

It’s like they are a whole nation of Gen Y’s stepping to the right when they should be considering a pelvic thrust with their knees in tight.

Today a mystery was solved, courtesy of an economist who has given me the clues I have been seeking.

He said that the floating of the Australian dollar in the 1980’s has allowed our economy to buffer itself against changes and hence remain stable and in growth for almost three decades.

His actual words were that “the free floating dollar is our shock absorber”.

But it has also meant that our exports are mostly limited to resources, agriculture and just two segments of the services sector, education and tourism.

In education and tourism we import people and provide services to them while they are in the country.

There are no strong exports of services themselves and now I know why.

Our currency fluctuates wildly and this discourages people from exporting services because there is too much risk on cash flow when one is selling into a foreign currency but the costs are in local currency.

So services companies are actively encouraged to focus only on the domestic market where costs and revenues are in the same currency.

Added to this encouragement is the stable nature of the local market, itself a product of the currency’s free floating habits.

It’s a double whammy that works against our services sector expanding into exports other than where we are servicing foreigners buying their services in Australian dollars.

Given that the services sector is now 68% of our GDP I see a problem ahead if resources and agriculture remain depressed.

We possibly need to find another way to import people and get them to use local services while they are here. Gaols maybe? The Chinese buying real estate is another.

Or we need to find service sector exports that don’t require local labour and have costs in other currencies. One example is the disintermediating internet businesses like Uber and AirBnB. But to develop these we also need risk capital, and lots of it; we don’t have it.

Otherwise we must rely on the four current export sectors and live with any currency-led depression of our individual and collective purchasing power. It’s not such a bad option when I think about it properly.

An automated toilet where certain functions (open and closing the seat, flushing, etc.) can be programmed (on an app on your phone) to automatically occur when you make a certain noise (e.g. whistle, click of the fingers, etc).

From a software engineer to me: “Interested readers might be interested in reading about the effects of George Selden’s patent on the car, Samuel Colt’s patent on the revolver, and the Wright brothers aviation patents.”

That’s a lot concatenated interests pointed at an ancient singularity.

Many software types often hate patents. It’s a required trait for membership of their club.

I suspect this has evolved from emotional issues related to their inherent introversion and consequent childhood experiences of exclusion, which had led to a disliking of any authority that constrains their keyboard tapping constructions.

They then support their patent hating position with cherry picked data, revealing their lack of training in any discipline of logical reasoning. Or in any form of constructing a non binary sentence.

But hey, at least in these characteristics they are with the majority in this post enlightenment era that we live in.

The Chinese aren’t fooling me; they’re harbouring vampires.

I wonder if the artist pinched the milk crates or paid for them.

Can any monopoly really have customers?

The fashion designer Tom Ford once said; “The right thing, at the wrong time is still the wrong thing.”

Man’s a genius; said the right thing for any time.

Having said that I once had a pair of Tom Ford sunnies that I lost a week after (the expensive) purchase.

That’s a case of the right thing lost at the wrong time being a very wrong thing.

Tiger Air has an interesting market development plan.

They seem to have decided to shrink their SAM (serviceable available market) by pissing off customers so much that they, the customers, vow never to return.

The cunning aspect of this plan is that by the time they are done the only passengers that will even want to fly with them will be those that for some inexplicable reason don’t mind the shoddiness of their service.

In this category are:

1. People that get to the airport a day before flying just so they can’t possibly miss their flight
2. People that are travelling for no fixed reason and hence don’t mind if they get to their destination a day late
3. Gen Y’s who don’t find it odd that a service provider doesn’t provide any service, and
4. Gen Y’s who find the vague statements of other Gen Y’s that work for an airline sort of comforting. Or to put this in another way, Gen Y’s that find logically decipherable answers somewhat threatening to their dissonance.
5. People that aren’t smart enough to figure out that a cheap ticket is only cheap if they don’t have to buy another one when the first one becomes useless for some reason or another.

Given that the residual customers will need to satisfy all five of these conditions I predict that Tiger will end up with about, oooo, 1% of the domestic air travel market.

But that 1%, they’ll be worth having. The big data on these easily-deluded fuckwits could be re-sold at great profit to every retailer in the country for big bikkies.

Which is to say, Tiger Air is just a loss-leader for identifying the most gullible consumers in the country. And that is GENIUS!

And to add to the commentary, our gubment has just released their ‘innovation’ statement.

It’s another example of the wrong starting point.

Trying to create innovation is very easy but attempting to boost high tech exports from their current 1.5% of all exports is bloody hard and they have ‘wisely’ ignored the subject in their report.

To be clear, just about anything can be labeled as innovation, e.g. changing the font on Telstra’s logo, hiring a new Chief Scientist or releasing a report on innovation.

In any case here’s the major initiatives in the innovation statement:

1. Give more money to CSIRO! Eek, CSIRO should be wound up and given to the universities. No matter where you’re going you wouldn’t start from where CSIRO is today.

2. Helping startups by softening ‘trading insolvent’ rules (which are ignored anyway) and letting crowd funding get up – a bad idea because everyone will lose money and there will be a big backlash.

3. Some more cash for science research in universities which is not needed in this IT century.

4. Changes to university grant funding processes which will actually hurt universities and their export earnings. Basically the government has failed to recognise that universities and businesses don’t interact because Australian business are mostly in the services sector and use off-the-shelf technology platforms from foreign vendors. The universities are their OWN business and they are our third largest exporter; the grant schemes need to be designed to get them up the global uni rankings so they can charge their foreign students even more.

5. A marketing budget for STEM education that ignores the fact that we already training about 5x too many SEM graduates and not enough T graduates.

6. An entrepreneur’s incoming visa scheme to help boost the taxi driver ranks.

7. A cyber security growth centre designed to hand over our private data to commercial entities.

8. Landing pads for Australian startups in foreign places like Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv. This is white collar welfare for the operators. And who in their right mind would take a start up to Israel?

9. Tax offsets and relief from capital gains tax for investments in start ups. This is guaranteed to bring the white shoe brigade back into the scene to ensure the whole thing goes belly up in a few years when the rorts are outed by the ATO.

I just had a quick review of the Watt review on Australian university research funding – http://www.education.gov.au/boosting-commercial-returns-research

My opinion is that the whole thing is based on a false premise…

1. Observation: low levels of engagement between universities and Australian business with respect to research outcomes

2. The assumed cause, which is incorrect, is that universities aren’t incentivised through the research grant system and hence don’t properly engage with business

3. The proposed actions that will make no difference: fiddle with the grant schemes yet again

The reason that universities aren’t engaged much with Australian business is that 70% of our GDP is in the services sector and most of the companies in the services sector are users of off-the-shelf technology platforms serving the local market and not developers of technology platforms for export sales.

I see no upside in the fiddling with the grant schemes for universities if business (note I say business and not industry, which is a misnomer) has no interest.

Having said that, I would note that university education is our third largest export (sad that).

Since the business sector lacks interest in research outcomes I would focus the grant process on helping universities get up the university rankings in order to help the value of those educational exports. This is the only way that fiddling with university grants could help our exports.

So sad to say, I think the report is extremely misguided.

If I’ve never noticed a work of art that I’ve apparently walked past dozens of times then it’s a fair guess that my brain has a very good reason for air brushing it out of existence.

By far the most interesting thing about this photo is the photo itself. What does it mean?

Tannoy on the train …”You could be fined for putting your feet on the seats”

Little boy, “Mum, what does ‘fined’ mean?”

Unintelligible mumble from mum.

Little boy, “I’m going to do it”

And he did.

Little boy, “Mum, nothing happened!”

Right there, State Rail has lost the moral imperative with yet another customer and a rebel is born. There is hope yet.

Paraphrasing a recent chat with some university senior manager types:

I said to them that if their university really wanted to rise up the rankings then my suggestion is that all their research becomes IT focused.

I picked chemistry by way of example.

There’s a global chemical industry and supply chain. And then there is chemistry departments in universities training chemists and also doing research in the discipline of chemistry.

I proposed that all the chemistry research at the university change to the development of IT technologies for use in the chemical sector and that there be no research in the discipline of chemistry itself because it has a much lower IRR and the benefits to society and industry are really quite incremental compared to the benefits of applying new IT technologies to the chemical sector.

This shift to IT focused research could occur right across the university and within no time the university would be the most relevant university within thousands of miles.

This suggestion is based on the fact that we are in the IT century. The relevance and return on non-IT research is much much lower.

This transition had already occurred in the venture capital sector where 99% of current investment is in IT. Real tech accounts for 1% (for example, where the product contains hardware device but usually using off the shelf technology), and there are virtually no science based start-ups being funded anywhere.

PS the photo below has zero relevance to this thesis but even so it’s far more useful than, say, Australian university research into the free radical kinetics of emulsion polymerisation.

“So to not breech non-disclosure deeds, may I organise our IT to issue you with a temporary guest email account to allow us to correspond more privately?”

I might just suggest wax-sealed scrolls sent by carrier pigeons or their nearest modern equivalents. What’s that droning noise?

I was at business function today where I heard, for the umpteenth time, about the movement to promote schemes that result in more women in senior business roles in Australia.

The data is compelling; the percentage of female CEOs and board members in Australia’s listed companies is well, well below 50%.

But I thought to myself, where’s the same argument applied to ethnic minorities and indigenous people? It doesn’t exist.

Why not?

The truth is that women have got to a certain representation that allows them to have a voice and promote the issue that they felt unduly made their own journey’s more difficult than their male colleagues.

Somehow every ‘minority’ has to magically get to some minimum threshold of representation whereafter they can collectively fight for their cause from within.

As an aside, this argument for representation in listed companies sort of proves that these roles have no genuine function; anyone can do them so long as they are sufficiently trained.

By comparison, privately owned and developed companies; the only barrier to entry here is character and perseverance. Sex, race, religion; they matter not a twat.

You don’t hear anyone who has started their own business talk about ‘representation’. It’s a term which makes no sense to them. You want it? Make it happen.

I discovered three very useful things today.

One, someone reckons that I’m not a narcissist.

Two, I not only dislike pocket squares but I also instantly distrust those wearing them.

Three, I can still be surprised. Ahmed at the local convenience store asked me, in quite a severe fashion, to take off my bike helmet in his shop. Then he broke down laughing at the look on my face

The other day I spent a couple of hours chatting to a Russian asylum seeker at the Asylum seekers drop-in/help centre.

An academic from Siberia, he has his hands on a couple of Russian technologies that he hopes to get funded here and to work on, if he is granted asylum.

One observation is that the centre would be a very interesting place to work at. Probably one of the most interesting.

A second is that the chances of finding a great and unknown Russian technology is pretty skinny these days. Maybe that first decade after the wall came down there might have been a few gems but now, less likely.

The third was, as I tried to explain through the telephone interpreter, Australia is the last place you’d seek asylum for a displaced technology. There’s simply no taste for risk investment here, especially into hardware technologies that the Russians seem so intent on developing.

I will do my best to help this fellow if he follows up. But only because of his situation. Any citizen that had approached me with these technologies would have got the usual advice. Nyet.

As a footnote, technologists in Australia would be well placed to flee and seek asylum elsewhere, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of membership of a particular social group and possessing certain progressive and bloody unpopular opinions. Also these guys are unable or, owing to such fear, unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of Club Australia for fear of being condemned to a life of servitude in a university, CSIRO or McDonalds.

I just spent a small effort explaining to my daughter the folly of using grumpiness or anger to get someone to act in a more amenable fashion.

The first effort failed because she was grumpy and angry.

The second effort seemed to work, after the grumpiness and anger had faded.

She acknowledged that editing other people just causes them to hide their true feeling. She also admitted that she wouldn’t like her family or friends modifying themselves just to avoid her ill humor.

She could see the potential for a lifelong pattern to emerge, one that would do her no favours.

At the Paris Climate Change summit, grasping at straws, our PM said “And by 2018 over 60 per cent of the world’s solar cells are to use technology developed by Australian researchers.”

That is 60% of cells might incorporate technology concepts developed at UNSW. In terms of the total contribution of all Australian solar technology I’d put the number closer to 1%.

And the licence fees for using this technology? Currently it’s zero and will remain so.

Exports of technology products? Currently we have one company exporting main stream solar technology. And I run it.

Fuckwits.

A Fitbit style band that goes around the base of a bloke’s cock.

Measuring all key metrics including a thrust monitor, blood pressure, diameter changes, etc, it transmits all the data via Bluetooth to your phone.

It also will include vibration alarms setup to alert the user to premature ejaculations and frequency tables.

Couples can pour over the data and setup frequency and thrust strength profiles to see if they can improve things.

Users can also download preset profiles guaranteeing different results.

Social media sharing will help promote good profiles and good sex.

Fucking endless possibilities…

PS just Googled it and its been done … The Lovely. Imagine doing actually doing this startup? Bloody Gen Y ignorance blows me away.

MS are such softies…

But when you think about it, it shows the issue with Windows. Who gives a shit where your files are on your Android or iPhone OS device?

Last night on the ABC I watched some dodgy docco on renewable energy.

Basically it was an advertisement for action on climate change masking as new information. You’d have to be pretty gullible to suck this shit up.

Anyway, the highlight for me was a segment on the Australian Founder of Sungevity, a Californian company that provides very un-sexy engineering services to solar installers in the US.

Working very hard to look like any other Californian start-up gone all unicorn, their offices are multi-coloured, they have an in-house crappy music band, an incubator run by the usual chick using her tits to get ahead, and the mad founder still hanging around in an advisory role and annoying the fuck out of everybody.

Well, they put on a ‘party’ for the ABC cameras and I swear the mad founder actually said ‘we’re here to be the most successful solar company and TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE’.

Clearly they have never watched ‘Silicon Valley’ and/or completely lack a sense or irony and/or completely lack a bullshit detector and/or are complete fuckwits (which covers all the others really).

It made my night. LOL

ps the incubator with tits is on the left and the founder is second from the right. The other two have jobs, were employed early on, and are pets of the founder since they were nice to him (by necessity) when he was their boss; he hardly knows anyone in the company now. The woman on the far right was sent to keep any eye on the founder in case he got too pissed.